Editorial: To go, or not to go? What are business attitudes to the philosophy of no-go policies and protected areas?

Dudley, Nigel

doi:10.2305/iucn.ch.2014.parks-21-2nd.en

“…In line with the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System, an International Treaty could even strongly frame human activities, guarantee peace and interest of mankind and nature in all glaciers and emerging postglacial ecosystems. Finally, limiting damaging activities by calling to public "no-go commitments" as in the World Heritage sites(Dudley et al, 2015), or by developing ecosystem's rights(Boyd, 2017), could be other avenues to explore. Increasing in-situ nature protection is a gigantic task when global changes…”

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confidence: 99%

Future emergence of new ecosystems caused by glacial retreat

Bosson,

Huss,

Cauvy-Fraunié

et al. 2023

Nature

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Glacier shrinking and the development of postglacial ecosystems related to anthropogenic climate change is one of the fastest ongoing ecosystem shifts, with paramount ecological and societal cascading consequences globally (Huss et al., 2017; Milner et al., 2017; IPCC, 2021). Yet, no complete spatial analysis exists to quantify or anticipate this major changeover Zimmer et al., 2022). Here we model glacier responses to climate projections until 2100 and subglacial terrain to explore the ecological trajectory of all glaciated areas, outside the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets. Depending on climate change magnitude, glaciers could lose less than one quarter to half of their area by 2100. Mainly composed of terrestrial, then marine and freshwater areas, deglaciated areas could range from the equivalent surface of Nepal to Finland. Ecological conditions in deglaciated areas will remain extreme in some regions, offering refuges for cold-adapted species, but become mild in others, favouring biogeochemical processes, primary productivity and generalist species.This unprecedented travel into the future of cold regions shows that glaciers and postglacial ecosystems have key roles to play to face climate change, biodiversity loss and freshwater scarcity. Less than a third of these vulnerable common goods, barely considered in nature conservation policies (IPBES, 2019), are located within protected areas. We therefore call to urgently enhance both climate change mitigation and the in-situ protection of these key ecosystems to secure their existence, functioning and values. Main TextA giant ecosystem shift to explore (409w without refs)What keeps life going? Biologically, one could state that to ensure their future, organisms reproduce and try to spread out. But each species has an environmental niche, restrained by frontiers Xu et al., 2020). Although the >200'000 Earth's glaciers and two continental ice sheets host species adapted to thrive in their extreme environments (Hotaling et al., 2017;Stibal et al., 2020;Gobbi et al., 2021), they are perfect examples of such a frontier. Indeed, the 10% of lands and the part of oceans covered by these owing ice masses are uninhabitable for most life forms. Yet, in the Anthropocene where humans have become the main force of planetary changes and especially because of anthropogenic climate change (

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Das Weltnetz der Biosphere Reserves (UNESCO WNBR) im Spiegel des Nachhaltigkeitskonzeptes: Stand und Perspektiven

Borsdorf

¹

,

Jungmeier²

2020

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Glaciers and postglacial ecosystems: common goods to protect in the Anthropocene

Bosson¹,

Huss

²

,

Cauvy‐Fraunié

³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Glacier shrinking and the development of postglacial ecosystems related to anthropogenic climate change is one of the fastest ongoing ecosystem shifts, with paramount ecological and societal cascading consequences globally (Huss et al., 2017; Milner et al., 2017; Cauvy and Dangles, 2019; IPCC, 2021). Yet, no complete spatial analysis exists to quantify or anticipate this major changeover (Ficetola et al., 2021; Zimmer et al., 2022). Here we model glacier responses to climate projections until 2100 and subglacial terrain to explore the ecological trajectory of all glaciated areas, outside the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets. Depending on climate change magnitude, glaciers could lose less than one quarter to half of their area by 2100. Mainly composed of terrestrial, then marine and freshwater areas, deglaciated areas could range from the equivalent surface of Nepal to Finland. Ecological conditions in deglaciated areas will remain extreme in some regions, offering refuges for cold-adapted species, but become mild in others, favouring biogeochemical processes, primary productivity and generalist species. This unprecedented travel into the future of cold regions shows that glaciers and postglacial ecosystems have key roles to play to face climate change, biodiversity loss and freshwater scarcity. Less than a third of these vulnerable common goods, barely considered in nature conservation policies (IPBES, 2019), are located within protected areas. We therefore call to urgently enhance both climate change mitigation and the in-situ protection of these key ecosystems to secure their existence, functioning and values.

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Editorial: To go, or not to go? What are business attitudes to the philosophy of no-go policies and protected areas?

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

Future emergence of new ecosystems caused by glacial retreat

Future emergence of new ecosystems caused by glacial retreat

Das Weltnetz der Biosphere Reserves (UNESCO WNBR) im Spiegel des Nachhaltigkeitskonzeptes: Stand und Perspektiven

Glaciers and postglacial ecosystems: common goods to protect in the Anthropocene

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