Managing climate-change refugia to prevent extinctions

HighlightsClimate-change refugia can support biodiversity by maintaining buffered conditions despite climate change and are a critical tool for the unfolding extinction crisis.Despite their capacity to protect biodiversity, climate-change refugia will be increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of multiple interacting stressors and may hence require management.Effective protection of biodiversity under climate change can be facilitated by managing or newly establishing climate-change refugia on the basis of multiple factors and processes that create them.Using four clear steps, appropriate actions to maintain climate-change refugia, ranging from minimal management to more extensive restoration efforts, can be determined.Identifying and managing climate-change refugia can reduce extinctions and contribute to landscapes that are holistically managed for biodiversity conservation under climate change.AbstractEarth is facing simultaneous biodiversity and climate crises. Climate-change refugia – areas that are relatively buffered from climate change – can help address both of these problems by maintaining biodiversity components when the surrounding landscape no longer can. However, this capacity to support biodiversity is often vulnerable to severe climate change and other stressors. Thus, management actions need to consider the complex and multidimensional nature of refugia. We outline an approach to understand refugia-promoting processes and to evaluate refugial capacity to determine suitable management actions. Our framework applies climate-change refugia as tools to facilitate resistance in modern conservation planning. Such refugia-focused management can reduce extinctions and maintain biodiversity under climate change.