One of every six species are extinguished by a climate change

Whatever you do politicians in their summits against climate change, a good part of the planet s species are already doomed to disappear. A review of recent studies that have analyzed the relationship between global warming and biodiversity shows that, in the worst-case scenarios, one of every six species of plants and animals will become extinct. Although the debacle will affect all branches of the tree of life, geographically primed with South America and Oceania.

The most recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draw a series of scenarios for the end of the century, calls the trajectories of concentration representative (CPR). The final destination of each trajectory is a certain concentration of carbon dioxide and, as a greenhouse gas that is, a temperature increase associated. Based on the current situation, where we have exceeded the figure of 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, the most optimistic scenario (the RCP 2.6 ) presents a global mean temperature increase of 2o. Other more realistic scenarios, encrypted the increase of global warming between 3º and 4 º, CPR scenarios 6.0 and RCP 8.5 respectively.

How will this rise in temperature to the ecosystems? How do different species will have the ability to adapt to global warming? What living beings are more vulnerable? These are some of the questions that many biologists and ecologists are trying to respond since it began to talk of climate change, at the end of the last century. Now, the biologist from the University of Connecticut (USA), Mark Urban, has collected more than a hundred studies focusing on the connection between global warming and species extinction. There are a couple of species and there are those who exceed the 24,000 . The results of this review are not very optimistic.

The damage that climate change is doing to the biodiversity has many faces. The same temperature rise that reduces the natural habitat of the polar bear is stressing you out to many amphibian species of the tropical rainforests. In the areas of Mediterranean climate, always on the verge of desertification, an extra degree of temperature is already quite a challenge for animals and plants. In the temperate zones, the advancement of spring this unseating many species that had paired his destiny to that of the flowering and fruiting of trees.

Where it is if there are differences in the geographical distribution of the extinctions. Although the disappearance of species will be a global phenomenon, the majority of the studies analyzed reveal that the most affected areas are South America, Australia and New Zealand. The impact will be less in the northern hemisphere. But, as regrets Urban, has not found too many studies for the case of Asia and even less for Africa.

The map shows how marine ecosystems in the tropics and Antarctica are those that have the greatest risk of extinction.


"My study cannot determine the exact reasons for these regional differences," explains this expert in evolutionary biology. "However, South America, Australia and New Zealand harbor many species with limited distribution, which implies that already have reduced habitat that could disappear more easily," he explains. In the case of the last two, in addition, its insular character assumes that the species most dynamic may not move to other areas as warming alters its original ecosystems.