Species susceptibility to climate change impacts

There is growing evidence that climate change will become one of the major drivers of species extinctions in the 21st Century. To date, most assessments of species extinctions under climate change have been based on either isolated case studies or large-scale modeling of species’ distributions. These methods depend on broad and possibly inaccurate assumptions, and generally do not take account of the biological differences between species. As a result, meaningful information that could contribute to conservation planning at both fine and broad spatial scales is limited. The IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria were developed before climate change impacts on species were widely recognized, and thus may need further refinement in order to identify the full suite of species at risk from climate change. This report presents susceptibility to climate change according to taxon-specific biological traits and examines the taxonomic and geographical distributions of the species most susceptible to climate change, comparing these to the existing assessments of threatened species in The 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.