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Earth s Future - 2025 - Pidd - Climate Refugia Could Disappear From Australia s Marine Protected Areas by 2040 (1)2.94 MB
Published VersionCC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Published VersionCC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open
Journal article
Climate Refugia Could Disappear From Australia's Marine Protected Areas by 2040
Earth's Future, Vol.13(10), pp.1-19
2025
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Abstract
Climate change manifests in the ocean as chronic stressors, including warming, acidification and deoxygenation, and as acute stressors such as marine heatwaves. While marine protected areas (MPAs) are often designed to mitigate local stressors such as fishing and mining, their design seldom considers climate change. Using the Australian marine estate as a case study, we use projections from 11 CMIP6 Earth System Models to assess the climate exposure of Australian waters, and implications for the MPA network. We find that, under scenarios that exceed 1.8°C of global surface warming this century, ocean climate is projected to surpass recent variability (1995–2014) from mid-century. This results in the disappearance of climate analogs—where future ocean conditions remain within recent variability—and of climate refugia—regions with slowest rates of environmental change, most likely to retain biodiversity—by 2040. Australian MPAs and unprotected areas exhibit similar patterns of exposure to warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and marine heatwaves, suggesting that MPA placement with respect to future climate is no better than random. Despite potential re-emergence of climate refugia after 2060 under lower-emissions scenarios, continued emissions under current Nationally Determined Contributions (SSP2–4.5) risk ecosystem collapse from chronic and acute thermal stress across protected and unprotected waters. While cutting emissions can partially cap or delay climate impacts, even under lower-emissions scenarios, effective conservation requires adaptive strategies that protect biodiversity in place and on the move.
Details
- Title
- Climate Refugia Could Disappear From Australia's Marine Protected Areas by 2040
- Authors
- A. M. Pidd (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Science, Technology and EngineeringD. S. Schoeman - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Science, Technology and EngineeringA. J. Richardson - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research OrganisationK. L. Scales - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Science, Technology and Engineering
- Publication details
- Earth's Future, Vol.13(10), pp.1-19
- Publisher
- John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
- Date published
- 2025
- DOI
- 10.1029/2025EF006457
- ISSN
- 2328-4277
- Copyright note
- © 2025. The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
- Data Availability
- NetCDF files used for analysis in this study are free and publicly available for download from the Earth System Grid Federation Data Node (https://aims2.llnl.gov/search). All relevant metadata are included in Table S1 of the Supporting Information S1. All analyses were completed in R Programming Software (R Core Team, 2025), which included the use of Climate Data Operators (Schulzweida, 2023) to process batches of large NetCDF files. All code used in the analyses described in the Methods section can be found in the following complete and publicly-available Zenodo repository (Pidd, 2025). This repository is linked to a corresponding GitHub repository, and includes a README detailing the complete workflow necessary for reproducing this study, copies of figures, and details on machine specifications at the time of analysis. Please contact the corresponding author for questions regarding code in this repository.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Science, Technology and Engineering
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991177625002621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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- Domestic collaboration
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- Environmental Sciences
- Geosciences, Multidisciplinary
- Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences
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