Destroying Nature Has Made These Nations More Vulnerable to Climate Change

There's a longstanding truism about this warming world of ours: Climate change will perversely do the most damage to those most vulnerable. Poorer countries in the global south have fewer resources and weaker infrastructure to deal with the incipient heat-crush. And that's certainly true.

But now, scientists have discovered that many rich nations have actually rendered themselves more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, by drastically developing and destroying the natural habitats they rely upon. And yes, the US is among them.

Scientists from Stanford, the University of Queensland, and the Wildlife Conservation Society have published a groundbreaking new study in Nature Climate Change that seeks to detail which places are most vulnerable to the whims of our warming world.

The research finds that swaths of the American Midwest, central and western Europe, eastern South America, southeast Asia, and southern Australia are all squarely in the cross hairs of disruptive warming. The nations and states in these "most vulnerable" regions are rich. They all have this in common: They have done considerable damage to native ecosystems along their ascent to wealth—and continue to do so, even more effiiently, today.

The scientists' model attempts to "map ecoregional exposure to future climate, using a …gauge of future climate stability—defined as a measure of how similar the future climate of a region will be to the present climate," according to the paper's abstract.

Put simply, the scientists determined how radically the climate is expected to change from its current state in a given area. They then assessed how dramatically each region had been developed from its natural state (how many forests razed, waterways drained and polluted, etc.) in order "to present a measure of global ecosystem vulnerability." The thinking is that the more intact a region's wildlife, the more adaptable to change it will be. And "intact vegetation" is a nicer-sounding euphemism for "not clear-cut, burned down, or paved over."

The result is the map above. The light "cream" grey color denotes the world's most vulnerable regions—the places most developed and where climate will change most radically—while the dark greys shows those least vulnerable. The green, meanwhile, indicates regions where vegetation is mostly intact, but the climate instable—the orange shows the opposite.

Rich nations like the US, Spain, France, Germany and Italy have all rendered themselves among the most vulnerable to climate change.

So people, animals, and plants in Kansas, Italy, Brazil, China, Turkey, and Texas are among the most screwed. The Baltic states are in trouble, too, as are India, Thailand, and the Philippines. These are presumably places where things like mass deforestation, a reliance on monoculture crops, over-irrigation, and over-grazing have altered the landscape to the point where changes in the climate are apt to be magnified.

Meanwhile, Russia, Canada, and the northwestern US appear to be the least vulnerable, which is consistent with past evaluations. But some places shown as least vulnerable of all are more surprising: The Middle East, Saharan Africa, South Africa, Mexico, and Argentina are shown to be the least vulnerable to climatic shifts.

Now, this is purely from an ecological standpoint—those regions may still be home to severe humanitarian concerns as climate change continues on. As water sources, food availability, and arable farmland may dry up elsewhere, social turmoil may rise up in nations not directly vulnerable to climate change. And the map says nothing about the nature of a region's political institutions or the actual size of its population—it just measures ecological interference and climate variability.

So you might actually rather be living in Illinois than Istanbul when the climate crisis goes into full swing; then again, maybe not.

The authors made the map not with humans in mind, however, but with protecting ecosystems in general. Because the way they see it, some tough choices are going to have to be made about what gets protected, and what gets ceded to the increasingly harsh whims of the planet's atmosphere.

"We need to realize that climate change is going to impact ecosystems both directly and indirectly in a variety of ways and we can't keep on assuming that all adaptation actions are suitable everywhere. The fact is there is only limited funds out there and we need to start to be clever in our investments in adaptation strategies around the world," Dr. James Watson, the study's lead author, wrote in the study's release.

According to the paper, "Ecosystems with highly intact vegetation and high relative climate stability, for instance, are the best locations for future protected areas, as these have the best chance of retaining species."

In other words, the human-and-nature reserves of the future must be chosen carefully, and there are only a handful of places that are best suited for the task. The map is both hopeful and deeply depressing. It's a reminder that a lot of the world is going to be an ugly place to live before long, and mass migrations to the north and other stable pockets are probably in the cards. If this is the future of a warmed globe, then at least we have an atlas.