Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Human Health

Anthropogenic global warming has affected plants and animals around the world. Ecological changes in the phenology and distribution of plants and animals are occurring in all well-studied marine, freshwater, and terrestrial groups, and in every ocean and on every continent. These observed changes are heavily biased in the directions predicted from global warming and have been linked to local or regional climate change through correlations between climate and biological variation, field and laboratory experiments, and physiological research. Predator-prey and plant-insect interactions have been disrupted when interacting species have responded differently to warming. Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change. Tropical coral reefs and amphibians have been most negatively affected. The World Health Organization has already seen a rise in climate-related diseases and deaths. Many scientists now believe that another 2 degrees C over the next one-hundred years represents a threshold for “dangerous” climate change. Exceeding this threshold is expected to result in massive species' extinctions and possibly loss of some natural systems altogether.