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A climate risk index for marine life

Abstract

Climate change is impacting virtually all marine life. Adaptation strategies will require a robust understanding of the risks to species and ecosystems and how those propagate to human societies. We develop a unified and spatially explicit index to comprehensively evaluate the climate risks to marine life. Under high emissions (SSP5-8.5), almost 90% of ~25,000 species are at high or critical risk, with species at risk across 85% of their native distributions. One tenth of the ocean contains ecosystems where the aggregated climate risk, endemism and extinction threat of their constituent species are high. Climate change poses the greatest risk for exploited species in low-income countries with a high dependence on fisheries. Mitigating emissions (SSP1-2.6) reduces the risk for virtually all species (98.2%), enhances ecosystem stability and disproportionately benefits food-insecure populations in low-income countries. Our climate risk assessment can help prioritize vulnerable species and ecosystems for climate-adapted marine conservation and fisheries management efforts.

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Fig. 1: Spatially explicit assessment of climate vulnerability and risk for species and ecosystems globally.
Fig. 2: Climate vulnerability and risk for species.
Fig. 3: Climate risk patterns across marine ecosystems.
Fig. 4: Climate risk and conservation planning.
Fig. 5: Climate risk for fisheries among maritime countries.
Fig. 6: Climate risk and socio-economic equity.

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Data availability

All datasets used in this paper are described and archived at the publicly available sources listed in Supplementary Table 2. Species vulnerability scores are available through the Dryad digital repository114.

Code availability

Statistical analyses were conducted using the R statistical computing platform115, and the code is available upon request to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support to D.G.B. was provided by the Ocean Frontier Institute (Module G) and Oceans North. D.P.T. acknowledges support from the Jarislowsky Foundation and NSERC. S.H. acknowledges support from the National Environmental Research Council (grant no. NE/R015953/1) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 820989 (COMFORT). This research was enabled in part by support provided by ACENET (www.ace-net.ca) and Compute Canada (www.computecanada.ca).

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D.G.B. conceived and designed the study with input from B.W., D.P.T. and N.L.S. C.G., S.H., K.K., K.K.-R., R.B.R. and P.S.-Y. provided the data. D.G.B. wrote the computer code with input from A.P. D.G.B. conducted the analyses. D.G.B., B.W. and D.P.T. drafted the manuscript. All authors reviewed the methods and edited subsequent drafts.

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Correspondence to Daniel G. Boyce.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Joseph Maina and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Data availability.

a) The pie chart displays the proportion of assessed species across kingdoms. Colours show the numbers of species within each animal phylum and shading within the bars shows the number of species in each taxonomic class. b) Spatial distribution in the number of assessed species. Colours depict the number of species assessed per 1 × 1° cell. The gray shaded area in the right margin shows the total number of species assessed along latitude. The red line and axis are the average species richness of all marine taxa by latitude reported in Tittensor et al.180.

Extended Data Fig. 2 General overview of the steps in estimating the climate vulnerability and risk for species and ecosystems.

Thick arrow and numbers denote the sequence of analyses used to estimate climate risk from the input data layers. Red depicts the sensitivity and quality-control analyses that were completed.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Correlations between climate indices used to calculate climate vulnerability and risk.

Colours and numbers are the correlations between climate indices calculated for each species. Colour shading and text are the direction and strength of the relationships: red are positive and blue negative correlations.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–58, Tables 1–4 and Discussion.

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Boyce, D.G., Tittensor, D.P., Garilao, C. et al. A climate risk index for marine life. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 854–862 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01437-y

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