Protecting and restoring habitat to help Australia's threatened species adapt to climate change: Final Report (NCCARF Publication 58/13)

Summary for Policy Makers Australia’s biodiversity is threatened by climate change, but we currently know little about the scale of the threat or how to deploy on ground conservation actions to protect biodiversity against the changes expected. In this project we predict the impacts of climate change for threatened species and delineate the best options for climate adaptation for all these species collectively via protecting and restoring their habitat. For 504 of Australia’s currently threatened species we predict their distributional responses to climate change, under three climate change scenarios of increasing severity: early mitigation, delayed mitigation and business-as-usual. We then simulate the optimal placement of new protected areas and where necessary, restoration of critical habitat for those species most affected by a changing climate, taking into account variation in the costs and benefits of taking action in different places. We measured the benefits of protecting and restoring habitat by considering the long-term availability and quality of habitat for threatened species as climate changes. We undertook a state-of-the-art multi-action optimisation that accounts for spatial and temporal habitat connectivity under climate change. The scale of the prioritisation analysis implemented here is unprecedented in the conservation literature, and is only possible because of recent advances in software sophistication and parallel computer processing power.