Call for integrating future patterns of biodiversity into European conservation policy

Abstract

Given the unprecedented rates of global warming, widespread shifts in species’ distributions are anticipated to play a key role for their survival. Yet, current conservation policies often allocate priority to native species and their typical habitats, thereby preserving historic conditions rather than preparing for future species distributions. Policy initiatives aimed at halting biodiversity loss, such as the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, could provide an opportunity to proactively integrate species’ future distributions into conservation objectives on an international scale, for example, by encouraging management actions that allow for species migration along projected paths of dispersal. Acknowledging climate-tracking species as a conceptually distinct phenomenon, we qualitatively analyzed to which extent the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the legal framework it is embedded in, such as the Draft Note on Designation Criteria (ENV.D.3/JC) and the Framework for Blue and Green Infrastructure (SWD/2019/193), integrated climate-trackers into their conservation objectives. We found that the Biodiversity Strategy did not explicitly incorporate future patterns of species distributions into conservation planning but emphasized the maintenance of historical community compositions and species distributions. While the commitments in these legal documents to nature restoration will certainly be helpful for biodiversity conservation today and after 2030, it may miss the chance to be a more comprehensive conservation policy.