Copenhagen: It’s About Wildlife Too

My colleague Tom Lovejoy, Biodiversity Chair at the Heinz Center and head of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel for Global Environment Facility, has an excellent reminder in his New York Times piece The Earth is Crying Out for Help that the talks in Copenhagen involve so much more than targeting parts per million in the atmosphere.

The talks must also include an adequate response to safeguard wildlife and the living planet we all depend on from the impacts of carbon pollution.

Tom says:

Everywhere one looks on the planet, nature is on the move in ways never seen before by natural science. Species are changing the timing of their life cycles, and some are already moving and changing where they occur. We are beginning to see a decoupling of tight links in nature in which one element is cued by day length and the other by temperature. With the earlier arrival of spring, for example, snowshoe hares are now no longer camouflaged by their brilliant white winter coats because they are in snowless landscapes — completely obvious to predators.” Read more.