Biodiversity Paradox: Nature’s Pace Slows Down Despite Accelerating Climate Change
Climate change is often expected to speed up ecological change, reshuffling species as environments shift. But a new study from researchers at Queen Mary suggests a more troubling reality: ecosystems may be losing their ability to adapt at all, as the regional diversity needed to replenish them steadily declines.
At the Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainability here at Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences (SBBS), my team and I recently uncovered a global ecological paradox.
While it is widely expected that accelerating climate change will speed up nature’s pace—forcing species to replace each other more rapidly—we found the exact opposite. By analyzing a century of data across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, we discovered that local species turnover is actually slowing down.
My colleague and lead author, Dr. Emmanuel Nwankwo, uses a striking analogy to explain this: “Nature functions like a self-repairing engine, constantly swapping out old parts for new ones. But we found this engine is grinding to a halt.”
Our study, published in Nature Communications, suggests that widespread habitat degradation has depleted the "spare parts" of this engine: the regional pools of species capable of surviving in modified ecosystems. Without a diverse species pool to draw from, the internal dynamics of these communities are seizing up, even as climate change accelerates.
This research highlights the complex, often counter-intuitive responses of biodiversity to human impact. It is just one example of the diverse research we undertake at SBBS, where we combine fieldwork at sites around the world with data science and theoretical modelling to truly understand life in a changing world.
Axel Rossberg, Professor in Theoretical Ecology, Head of The Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainability
Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainability
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Read the paper here