Climate change and biodiversity loss: the effects on ecosystem services (CLIMBE)

Aline Chiabai, Julia Martín Ortega, Elena Ojea Fernández-Colmeiro, Muhammad Ibrahim, Fabrice DeClerck, Diego Tobar López, Pablo Imbach, Alejandra Martínez.

Biodiversity loss is expected to accelerate in the near future as a consequence of climate change. This process of decline not only implies the disappearance of species, but also of the goods and services they provide to man. The topic now being debated is how this loss will impact on the welfare of the present and future population.

The goal of this project is to assess the ecological and economic implications of climate change for the biodiversity of forest ecosystems, focusing on the Central America region that is home to a large portion of the world’s biological capital. The main results will include a detailed GIS inventory of forest ecosystems and the services they supply to man; an estimation of how the scale of the threat to biodiversity affects the quantity and quality of the services performed; and, finally, an assessment of the ecological and economic impact on society of forest biodiversity loss in different climate change scenarios.

The results of this project have been explained in the book  ‘Climate Change Impacts on Tropical Forests in Central America: En Ecosystem Service Perspective‘, published by Routledge in June 2015.