BECC AG: Social and ecological context of climate change adaptation for biodiversity

Climate change is a main threat to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (IPBES, 2019), and isprojected to lead to alarming rates of local and global species extinction during the coming decades (Bellard el a1.,2012). To date, agreements and funding to mitigate negative consequences from climate change have mainly focused on direct socioeconomic impacts, and not on protecting natural ecosystems and nature's contributions to people (Pecl et a1.,2017). Meanwhile, there is an increasing need for practical strategies that effectively reduce and prevent negative impacts from climate change on biodiversity (IPCC, 2019), hereafter referred to as adaptation strategies for biodiversity. To achieve effective adaptation strategies for biodiversity, there is a need to better understand how outcomes are affected by biophysical context (e.g. species' mobility and adaptability to climate change, if the focus is on genetic, functional or species diversity), social context (e.g. stakeholders' attitude, behavior and engagement, and impacts on livelihood), and their interaction (Brooke,2008; Mawdsley et al., 2009).

We propose to initiate a BECC Action Group (AG) with the aim to better understand how social-ecological context matters for the outcomes of adaptation strategies for terrestrial biodiversity.

This will be achieved through knowledge exchange and creation during the planned workshop (Activity 1), in the network that the AG creates with BECC researchers from different research fields and an expert group consisting of invited external researchers and representatives from local and regional authorities, and by a quantitative review and synthesis assessing the published literature on existing adaptation strategies for biodiversity and how they have been studied (Activity 2).