Authors: Ranius, Thomas; Hämäläinen, Aino;Widenfalk, Lina A;Seedre, Meelis;Felton, Adam;Filyushkina, Anna;Öckinger, Erik;

It is a challenge to adapt conservation strategies to a changing climate. We systematically compiled recommendations from scientific literature reviews regarding adapting biodiversity conservation to climate change in boreal and temperate regions. Most recommendations belonged to eight dominating categories: (i) Promote both connectivity that facilitates dispersal through landscapes and connectivity that maintains populations within landscapes; (ii) Focus on sites acting as climate refugia, (iii) Protect a few large areas rather than many smaller; (iv) Consider the regional location, especially by locating conservation measures at sites predicted being important in the future; (v) Protect areas also temporarily, as a response to extreme events or changes in range distributions; (vi) Increase habitat diversity over landscapes by protecting many different habitats; (vii) Mitigate habitat deterioration caused by climate change and restore degraded habitats in production landscapes, and (viii) Decrease land use intensity and adapt practices to climate change, for example by increasing the ecological resilience to climatic stresses.
Climate change implies that more conservation efforts are required to reach conservation goals. To protect biodiversity, both traditional conservation strategies and strategies adapted to climate change are needed; moreover, novel approaches developed as a response to climate change will become relevant.