Groundswell : Preparing for Internal Climate Migration

This report, which focuses on three regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America that together represent 55 percent of the developing world’s population—finds that climate change will push tens of millions of people to migrate within their countries by 2050. It projects that without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people—or around 2.8 percent of the population of these three regions—could be forced to move within their own countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change. They will migrate from less viable areas with lower water availability and crop productivity and from areas affected by rising sea level and storm surges. The poorest and most climate vulnerable areas will be hardest hit. These trends, alongside the emergence of “hotspots” of climate in- and out-migration, will have major implications for climate-sensitive sectors and for the adequacy of infrastructure and social support systems. The report finds that internal climate migration will likely rise through 2050 and then accelerate unless there are significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and robust development action

Genetic Resources and Adaptive Management of Conifers in a Changing World

Climatic change causes a mismatch between tree populations on sites they currently occupy and the climate to which they have adapted in the past. The maintenance of productivity and of ecological and societal services requires resilient populations and ecosystems, particularly close to the vulnerable trailing (xeric) range limits. The studies confirm the selective effect of diverse habitat/climate conditions across the species ranges. Soil conditions may mask climate effects and should be considered separately. The unique potential of provenance tests is illustrated by growth response projections that may be less dramatic than provided by usual inventory data analyses. Assisted migration appears to be a feasible management action to compensate for climatic warming. However, the choice of populations needs special care under extreme conditions and outside the limits of current natural distribution ranges. The proper differentiation of measures according to the present and future adaptive challenges require the continuation of long-term analyses and the establishment of better focused field trials in disparate climates that contain populations from a representative range of habitats. The studies present results obtained from diverse regions of the temperate forest zone, from Central and Northwestern Europe, the Mediterranean, Russia, China, North and Central America

Modeling of population distribution in space and time to support disaster risk management

Despite its importance for Disaster Risk Management (DRM), the mapping of human distribution and population exposure has lagged behind hazard modeling and mapping. Assessing population exposure to actual or potential disasters can benefit all phases of the disaster management cycle, e.g. risk and impact assessment, mitigation, preparedness (including early warning and evacuation), and response. This assessment requires geo-information on population distribution at a range of spatial and temporal scales, as disasters can strike at any time and with little warning, and affect from local to global areas. This thesis comprises contributions of population distribution modeling to advancing Disaster Risk Management and Reduction efforts by: (i) developing geospatial models that improve population distribution datasets at a range of relevant spatial and temporal scales and resolutions; (ii) applying those data to (real) disaster risk scenarios by combining geospatial population layers with geophysical hazard maps; (iii) using spatial analysis for quantitatively and qualitatively assessing human exposure to specific hazards and levels, for cartographic representations and visualization, and for showing contributions to DRM. We conclude that since impacts of hazards and disasters are place and time dependent, several DRM and Disaster Risk Reduction phases and activities would benefit from relying on more spatially-detailed and time-specific assessments of population exposure, at a range of relevant spatio-temporal scales (local to global). Also, improving population distribution data for human exposure assessment requires addressing challenges present in input data and geospatial modeling. While at local scale in data rich environments more detailed and sophisticated models can be developed with acceptable uncertainty, scaling up such approaches to the global domain requires addressing different challenges, such as limitations in data availability, quality, and concepts in order to maximize the range of uses of population data, especially for supporting ongoing international development agreements. Finally, geospatial information on population distribution constitutes crucial baseline data for risk analysis and DRM across a range of hazards and threats, and investing in improving data benefits population-related analyses by detailing and revealing a sharper picture, with the aim of ‘leaving no one behind’

The future of population data

In 1994, the ICPD agreed on a Programme of Action (PoA) that recognized the fundamental importance of population and development data for government planning and monitoring. It put a special emphasis on the need for more accurate data to define women’s social and economic status, and stressed data disaggregation to understand and address the needs of people pushed furthest behind.  Since then, recurring calls for improving data systems and capacities have echoed these recommendations. The United Nations Secretary-General recently called for a “data revolution” to equip all national governments with data systems to track and achieve the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and related international commitments.  In 2024, the thirtieth anniversary of the ICPD provides a moment to reflect on progress and gaps in population data and to outline key pathways to achieve future-ready data systems for the post- 2030 global development agenda.

Does global warming worsen poverty and inequality? An updated review

We offer an updated and comprehensive review of recent studies on the impact of climate change, particularly global warming, on poverty and inequality, paying special attention to data sources as well as empirical methods. While studies consistently find negative impacts of higher temperature on poverty across different geographical regions, with higher vulnerability especially in poorer Sub-Saharan Africa, there is inclusive evidence on climate change impacts on inequality. Further analyzing a recently constructed global database at the subnational unit level derived from official national household income and consumption surveys, we find that temperature change has larger impacts in the short term and more impacts on chronic poverty than transient poverty. The results are robust to different model specifications and measures of chronic poverty and are more pronounced for poorer countries. Our findings offer relevant inputs into current efforts to fight climate change

Developing new tools to address the impact of climate change on the evolutionary and distributional history in plant lineages

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Biología. Fecha de lectura: 28-02-202

Climate Change, Modelling and Conservation of the World’s Terrestrial birds

Global climate change is an important threat to biodiversity and is predicted to be a major driver of wildlife population extinctions throughout the current century. Across a wide range of taxa, a well-documented response to climate change has been changes in species distributions, often towards higher latitudes and altitudes. Species distribution models (SDMs) have been widely used to predict further range changes in future but their use has often focused on discrete geographical areas. Moreover, SDMs have typically been correlative, ignoring biological traits. Here, I use SDMs to project future ranges for the world’s terrestrial birds under climate change. To improve the realism of projected range changes, I incorporate biological traits, including species’ age at first breeding and natal dispersal range. I use these projections to predict large-scale patterns in the responses of terrestrial birds to climate change, and to explore the implications of these models for avian conservation. There is little consensus on the most useful predictors for SDMs, so I begin by exploring how this varies geographically. With this knowledge, I develop SDMs for the world’s terrestrial birds and project future species ranges using three different global climate models (CCSM4, GFDL-CM3, HadGEM2-ES) under a low (rcp26), a medium (rcp45) and a high (rcp85) representative concentration pathway. The projected ranges are used to identify species most at risk from climate change and to highlight global hotspots where species are projected to experience the highest range losses. I explore how the projected range changes affect global species communities and I identify areas where species communities are projected to change or novel communities will emerge. I assess how projected changes will affect the ability of the global Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) network to confer protection on the world’s terrestrial bird species. Additionally, I highlight - based on projected range loss and suitable habitat and climate space beyond the dispersal range - species that will be unable to track climate change and that could be candidates for Assisted Colonization (AC). Finally, I explore the divergence between global species richness (SR) patterns and phylogenetic diversity (PD) for the world’s terrestrial birds, to assess if measuring biodiversity and setting conservation targets based on SR can be expected to cover their PD as well. Identifying the global consequences of projected range changes can inform future conservation efforts and research priorities. Changes in range extent and overlap were projected for the vast majority of the world’s terrestrial birds, with one-fifth projected to experience major range losses (>75% decline in range extent projected). This has far reaching consequences for the IBA network, with an overall trend of species moving out of the IBA coverage. Furthermore 13% of the world’s terrestrial birds are projected to have severe range losses that, combined with an inability to follow suitable habitat and climate space, mean they could benefit from AC as a conservation tool. Overall, PD was found to be highly correlated to SR on a global scale; however, there are localized differences where PD is higher or lower than could be expected from SR alone. These differences suggest that considering PD could enhance conservation planning. The results demonstrate the major threat that climate change poses for the world’s terrestrial bird species across all areas of the globe, and highlight the importance of considering climate change impacts to enhance their protection