29^th World Climate Congress

Ecology and Ecosystems

Climate change is transforming ecosystems on an extraordinary scale, at an extraordinary pace. As each species responds to its changing environment, its interactions with the physical world and the organisms around it change too.  Climate change is happening on a global scale, but the ecological impacts are often local and vary from place to place. Living things are intimately connected to their physical surroundings. Even small changes in the temperature of the air, the moisture in the soil, or the salinity of the water can have significant effects. Each species is affected by such changes individually, but those individual impacts can quickly reverberate through the intricate web of life that makes up an ecosystem. Shifts in species’ ranges (the locations in which they can survive and reproduce), and shifts in phenology (the timing of biological activities that take place seasonally) are the two important types of ecological impacts of climate change have been observed.