Climate change causing more species to go extinct in temperate regions, UA study shows

Researchers from the University of Arizona found that climate change is causing more species to go extinct in temperate regions than tropical ones. Temperate regions are now warming faster.

Researchers analyzed over 5,000 plant and animal species from around the world.

They found that 49% of temperate species experienced climate-related extinctions compared to 33% of tropical ones.

John Wiens is an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Arizona.

“So people thought that tropical species would be more sensitive to climate change. And part of what we find is just that there’s much more climate, there’s been much more climate change, much more warming in the temperate zone, and that just seems to wipe out any other effect,” he said.

University of Arizona researcher Gopal Murali says for decades, scientists generally believed that temperate species were vulnerable to climate change.

“The general view is that it’s happening somewhere in the remote place, something like in the rainforest in the tropical region and so on. But then what we found is that it’s also becoming a global crisis,” he said.

Researchers found that the maximum increase in temperature in temperate regions was 6 degrees Fahrenheit — almost twice as much as the increase in temperature in the tropical regions.