Building resilience to climate change

Why WWF works on resistance and resilience

WWF is keenly aware that climate change is already affecting biodiversity and ecosystems.

 We focus our work in 2 areas:

• Documenting the impacts of climate change and the need for solutions.
  
  
• Developing strategies to build resistance and resilience in 'front-line' ecosystems and communities where responses to climate change are needed in order to achieve long-term conservation.

We are working in all regions of the world from tropical coral reefs to Arctic ecosystems. In our surveys of these diverse habitats we find increasing evidence of the impacts of climate change.

While WWF's first approach to climate change is prevention, through the development of strong and coherent policy to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases, it is all too apparent that increased emissions to the earth's atmosphere have created a longer legacy.

As we shift our energy use away from fossil fuels we alleviate the amount of new CO₂ entering the Earth's atmosphere. However, it will take time for levels already in the atmosphere to stabilise.

Helping nature to resist

It is imperative that we take action to conserve ecosystems in their changed environment. These activities are referred to as 'resistance and resilience building' (adaptation). They are management tools to assist nature, but they are not long-term solutions. Only swift actions to reduce emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases will bring about a long term solution to the problems caused by climate change.

Resistance and resilience strategies can vary.

Limiting non-climate stresses (such as pollution, habitat loss, and introduction of invasive species) can help increase the natural resistance and resilience of ecosystems to the added stress of climate change.

Other approaches involve using protected areas to help resist the effects of climate change. Altering reserve design strategies, adding robust corridors, linking reserves of different habitat types (such as marine and terrestrial), developing networks of reserves along climate gradients or changing allowed usage during periods of added stress can all contribute to improved performance.

WWF is developing and implementing resistance projects with stakeholder groups, including local communities, national, regional and local government agencies, WWF national organisations and other local conservation and research groups (universities, climate institutes, ecologists, conservation biologists, hydrologists and others).