Trends in Ecology & Evolution
OpinionUsing Climatic Credits to Pay the Climatic Debt
Section snippets
Climatic Debt and Credit and the Value of Budgeting
In response to climate change, organisms must migrate, adapt via phenotypic or evolutionary mechanisms, or face extinction [1]. Across many parts of the world and a range of taxa, changes in species’ distributions following recent decades of climate change have been smaller than expected. The difference between observed and expected changes is described as climatic debt (see Glossary) (Figure 1), which is ‘repaid’ when biodiversity reaches equilibrium with the new climate. The prime focus of
Estimating Climatic Debts and Credits
Estimation of climatic debt begins with the quantification of the relationship between community structure and temperature, so that temperature can be inferred from the observed species composition (Figure 1, Figure 2). The most common approach is to calculate the community temperature index (CTI) from the species temperature indices (STIs) of the species present (e.g., [3,6,7,23,24]). To calculate the current climatic debt, the inferred temperature (e.g., CTI) is subtracted from the observed
Climate Accounting
The magnitude of ongoing climate change has precipitated a paradigm shift from trying to conserve current or historical conditions to managing ecosystem change [45,46] (Box 1). Climatic debts are likely to grow until a system converges to a new equilibrium state, perhaps involving catastrophic changes such as ecosystem collapse. Climatic credits could permanently offset portions of the debt by reducing the extent to which the equilibrium point moves, minimising biological change and risks of
Concluding Remarks
Transient dynamics, such as climatic debt, are challenging to quantify and understand [21]. We propose a climatic credit–debt framework that builds on established concepts to assess impacts of warming and provide intuitive tools to evaluate adaptation options. Although this framework addresses the symptoms rather than the causes of climate warming, credits have the potential to reduce the magnitude of biodiversity changes at local or regional scales and increase the scope for adaptation.
Acknowledgments
Our thanks to Pieter De Frenne, two anonymous referees, and the editor for helpful comments on a previous version.
Glossary
- Climatic credit
- a change in the environment that offsets part or all of a climatic debt and can be quantified in the same units as the debt (e.g., °C or mm year−1). Typically relates to management interventions that could reduce the debt.
- Climatic debt
- usually defined as the difference between the observed environmental temperature and the temperature at which the observed community would be at equilibrium with the environment (see ‘inferred temperature’), in degrees Celsius; equally applicable to
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Cited by (3)
Climatic debts for global amphibians: Who, where and why?
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Twitter: @IanVaughan21 (I.P. Vaughan).