Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♪ [music] ♪
- [Chris Thomas] At least 10% and perhaps as many as a third of all of the species
on land might become extinct because of climate change.
As the climate warms, species shift towards the poles and to higher
elevations in mountains but at some point, they run out of places to go and those are
the species that we think are really endangered with extinction from climate
change.
The question then is can we save many species from extinction?
♪ [music] ♪
The exciting and terrifying thing about global climate change is that it is
happening and it's going to continue.
And so our wildlife is already on the move. It's going to continue moving and
the ecosystem of butterflies and other insects and wildlife here has changed
already as a result of climate change.
I'm Chris Thomas. I'm Professor of Conservation Biology
at the University of York.
- [Professor Jane Hill] The climate is warming by about 1 degree in the last
century. And that's having quite a significant impact
on biodiversity globally.
My name is Professor Jane Hill and I'm an ecologist interested in understanding how
climate change and habitat loss affects biodiversity.
♪ [music] ♪
- [Chris Thomas] The effects of climate change are absolutely everywhere
in front of you.
You just look in this meadow and what you see is butterflies, the ringlet butterfly,
the small skipper, the gatekeeper butterfly which have all arrived here in
the last 20 to 40 years as they've expanded their distributions northwards.
And overall we estimate that it's about 1 and 3 quarter kilometers per year that
species are moving towards the poles.
And that is equivalent to five meters a day.
- The map here shows one of our study species that we've
been working a lot on, which is the speckled wood butterfly.
So this is a butterfly whose distribution is shifting northwards as the climate has
changed.
And one of the things that we know is that it is expanding its range much more
quickly in areas where there is more woodland.
And so in many places in Britain there aren't the habitats available, so we are
looking at ways in which we may be able to help it.
- [Chris Thomas] One thing that we can do is to try and provide landing mats
if you like.
This used to be a wheat field and I've progressively turned it back into a
wildflower meadow to provide a sort of landing pad, a stepping stone allowing
species to move from one region to another and thereby survive this pernicious and
completely widespread effect of human activities on the natural world.
- The research at York is definitely cutting edge.
When you go to a conference, if you say you're a PhD student at York,
people immediately know it's Chris Thomas and Jane Hill and they know
their research.
They know what they've been publishing recently.
- If we make a breakthrough and find out something new, that's really exciting.
And we also know that if we go out and do field work, we see some amazing changes
going on in terms of species changing their range.
So that's really exciting to see climate change having an impact right in front
of your eyes.
- When I was undergrad, everyone was starting to talk about climate change
and there was a lot of controversy around it,
so it was a really exciting field to be in.
And it's an area where you have a chance to have a real global impact.
- The research that we've been doing is signalling to everyone that the world is
responding. It's responding very rapidly to climate change
and we need to do something about it.
♪ [music] ♪