Description
The biodiversity policy of the European Union is considered as one of the more advanced and effective intergovernmental nature conservation instruments. Even so, the ambitious target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010 has not been met. In the new EU targets for the year 2020, the European Commission has included climate change as one of the key challenges for biodiversity conservation in the near future. Meeting this challenge requires insight at three levels: the climate change impacts on biodiversity in the EU; the adaptation options available to alleviate these impacts; and the level at which current EU policy can accommodate the adaptation options. In this work we bring together these three levels and identify matches and gaps between them, to guide future policy.Our work highlights three important gaps: 1) Not all impacts of climate change are captured by the adaptation options that have been put forward. Options are mostly focussing on shifts and contractions in the distributions of species. The dependencies and interactions between species, many of which are disrupted by climate change, are not addressed yet. 2) Adaptation options as suggested in the literature are very generic and lack spatial specificity. Given that also impacts differ throughout Europe, translating these adaptation options into policy is by no means straightforward. 3) While current EU biodiversity policy already provides some opportunities to make the Union’s biodiversity more robust against climate change, its effectiveness depends on voluntary action by Member States and on a strict interpretation of the term “favourable conservation status”. Clarification in implementation and interpretation guidelines as well as new policy tools are needed to facilitate effective adaptation of biodiversity conservation to climate change.
| Period | 19 Mar 2013 |
|---|---|
| Event title | European Climate Change Adaptation Conference |
| Event type | Conference |