Frontiers Award goes to biologist who demonstrated the impact of climate change on species displacement
The Nobel Prizes 2024 have honored the work of five researchers who were previously distinguished by the BBVA Foundation with its Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. The judging committee of these prizes—awarded by the BBVA Foundation for the past 15 years—has shown an ability to get ahead of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, thereby making the Frontiers of Knowledge awards a reliable herald of international scientific excellence. On no fewer than 31 occasions, winners of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards have gone on to win Nobel Prizes months or years later.
In the mid 1990s, Parmesan showed that several butterfly species in the United States and Europe were moving northwards and upward to escape rising temperatures. Over the next three decades, she expanded on this work to show that the same climate change impact was being felt by thousands of plant and animal species worldwide both on land and in the oceans.
Professor Parmesan was thus able to establish that rising temperatures had left a “globally coherent fingerprint” on biodiversity. An insight, said the committee, that “underpins climate change ecology,” one of the research fields most strongly to the fore in combating the environmental crisis.
Her research has provided vital input to the design of effective conservation strategies “adopted by governments and agencies around the world” that factor species displacements due to global warming; among them, the creation of corridors to connect habitats, assisted migrations and protected areas that provide a refuge for wildlife affected by rising temperatures.
Impact on health, fisheries, and agriculture
Parmesan’s work has “major ramifications for global public health, due to the polewards expansion of tropical diseases like malaria or dengue that are transmitted by mosquitos, as well as for sectors such as agriculture and fisheries, which will need to come to terms with the warming-driven migrations of terrestrial and marine species,” explains committee secretary Carlos Duarte, holder of the Tarek Ahmed Juffali Research Chair in Red Sea Ecology at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia).
Parmesan explains that, “Where you can grow things is shifting, and farmers have already realized this. And fishermen are noticing that the species they catch are not the same as before. Not only that, diseases too are moving polewards. There are even pathogens that are remerging as the Arctic ice melts. For instance, cases of anthrax have been found among the reindeer that form part of the diet of Inuit populations. The animals, it turns out, contracted the disease when the bacteria that causes it was released into the atmosphere as the tundra thawed. Then you have the fact that higher atmospheric CO₂ is lowering the nutritional value of crops, which is something that’s starting to worry dietitians.”