Practical Adaptationsto

Climate Change

David Sheppard

Is Climate Change Real?

• 1. Some animals are appearing earlier in the spring and some plants are coming into leaf or flowering earlier in the spring.

• 2. Some animals and plants are extending their distribution northwards in areas previously considered too cold for them.

• Animals that emerge from hibernation or some kind of winter torpor need food.

• The food source has to respond to increased spring temperature in the same way and at the same rate as the animal needing to eat it.

• There is an asynchrony between responses to temperature and responses to day-length.

bird/insect

insect/plants

• Earlier activity in spring

• Extra generations during the summer

• Activity later into the autumn

• Population spread

• Latitude

• Altitude

• How much can we change the landscape

to accommodate these new requirements?

• The solution could start in parks, gardens and other places held as less valuable to our native fauna and flora.

• Places such as gardens, parks and zoos.

• What if zoos would plant those early-flowering plants that local native species need in order to survive?

• What if zoos planted the right combination of plants to allow animals to complete their life-cycles?

• What if zoos planted those plants which the rapidly dispersing species require as food?

• What if zoos planted those plants which enabled animals to complete that extra generation in the autumn or encourage those insects that pollinated those late-flowering plants?

• Zoos can set the example to that group of the public who are interested in our natural environment. All 26 million of them every year.

• Zoos can show that climate change is having impacts all over the world, not just here.

• Zoos can demonstrate how they are working with the effects of climate change not trying to stop it or pretending that nothing is happening.

• And if Climate Change turns out to be that much wished for blip in the weather patterns, zoos will have shown that they recognised the plight of native species in this impoverished landscape and took it on themselves to make sure that their local fauna could survive within their zoo estates, even if the rest of the country did not care.