The worsening effects of climate change threaten to encourage a new kind of disease on the world—one that we may have very few defenses against, if any.
COVID has fallen out of the minds of most people, but the prospect of another pandemic hitting in the future looms large for some scientists. And that’s in great part because the worsening effects of climate changePLOS Computational Biology
“We know an incredible amount of potentially viable organisms are released from permafrost, but there has been no study to date on the ecological consequences,” Giovanni Strona, the study’s lead author, who works for the EU’s European Commission, told The Daily Beast. “This is what makes our work unique. Our results suggest that this might happen quite frequently, and that modern communities might be already strongly affected by ancient organisms released from melting ice.
Climate change was not the first motivation for study, but as Strona and his colleagues probed the questions further, “the more we realized that our study was not only unique, but also extremely worrisome. At some point, it was clear that science fiction was meeting reality,” he said. More specifically, the simulations suggest that about 3 percent of the unfrozen pathogens could become dominant in modern environments, and up to 1 percent could lead to unpredictable effects. That sounds like only a very small number of potential threats, right? But the simulations found that this 1 percent could kill off as much asof infected host species. After all, as we learned during COVID, it only takes one nasty pathogen to wreak havoc on the world.
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The impact of climate change on endangered plants and lichenThe Endangered Species Act (ESA) was a landmark protection for rare organisms in the United States. Although the ESA is known for its protection of wildlife, a majority of listed species are actually plants and lichen. Climate change will impact species populations globally. Already-rare species, like those listed in the ESA, are at an even higher risk due to climate change. Despite this, the risk climate change poses to endangered plants has not been systematically evaluated in over a decade. To address this gap, we modified previously existing qualitative assessment toolkits used to examine the threat of climate change in federal documentation on listed wildlife. These modified toolkits were then applied to the 771 ESA listed plants. First, we evaluated how sensitive ESA listed plants and lichens were to climate change based on nine quantitative sensitivity factors. Then, we evaluated if climate change was recognized as a threat for a species, and if actions were being taken to address the threats of climate change. We found that all ESA listed plant and lichen species are at least slightly (score of 1) sensitive to climate change, and therefore all listed plants and lichens are threatened by climate change. While a majority of ESA listing and recovery documents recognized climate change as a threat, very few had actions being taken in their recovery plans to address climate change directly. While acknowledging the threat that climate change poses to rare plants is an important first step, direct action will need to be taken to ensure the recovery of many of these species.
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