Emperor penguins could be lost to climate change by 2100

Marine scientists are calling for the urgent reclassification of the extinction threat level faced by the emperor penguin, after a change in approach to assessing the conservation status of the species and the environmental status of its Antarctic habitat suggest it could be lost within a lifetime.

Calculating the unique life history and critical dependence of emperor penguins on the Antarctic environment, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are calling for a threat level update, suggesting the species now meets a criteria ranging from Vulnerable to Endangered under the guidelines established by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

This would represent a ‘significant and urgent change’ from their current classification of Near Threatened to highlight the increased risk emperor penguins face due to anticipated changes to their home in the Antarctic.

The conclusions from the new study – Living with Uncertainty: Using multi-model large ensembles to assess emperor penguin extinction risk for conservation policy, published in the journal Biological Conservation – have significant implications for the IUCN Red List reassessment of emperor penguins.

“This is the first study to integrate natural variability in physical and biological processes and employ a wide range of Earth system and ecological models to account for numerous sources of uncertainty in projecting assessments of future population trajectories,” said Stephanie Jenouvrier, lead author on the paper and a senior scientist and seabird ecologist at WHOI.

“Improved methods for accounting for uncertainties are urgently needed to strengthen assessments of extinction and inform conservation efforts in an uncertain world.”

The study applies what WHOI scientists have called a Multi-Model Large Ensemble (MMLE) framework. It’s essentially a collection of earth system simulations allowing researchers to better understand the range of potential environmental outcomes and then assess all the uncertainties associated with those environmental projections.