Climate Change is Not the Primary Killer of Wildlife. But Wildlife Can Be Part of the Solution to Climate Change
If we care about wildlife populations, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that climate change is the primary culprit. It's not, according to population biologists.
Rethinking Biodiversity Loss: Why Climate Change Isn’t the Whole Story
By Poulomi Chakravarty and Hart Hagan
Please meet my colleague Dr. Poulomi Chakravarty. She wrote this article with some minor contributions from me. She earned her PhD by studying how land and vegetation impact weather and climate.
Let’s take a few minutes to rethink biodiversity and the loss of biodiversity and how they are--and are not--related to climate change.
Rethinking Biodiversity Loss: Why Climate Change Isn’t the Whole Story
When we talk about the biodiversity crisis, the narrative often circles back to one central culprit aka climate change; as media coverage frequently frames biodiversity loss in terms of heatwaves, mass die-offs, and extinction risks driven by rising temperatures (The Guardian, 2025; Time, 2024).
For instance, The Guardian (2025) reported that extreme heat has caused catastrophic die-offs, with howler monkeys collapsing from trees and intertidal species like barnacles “baking,” portraying biodiversity decline primarily as a byproduct of climate change. Similarly, Time (2024) critiqued simplistic tree-planting as a climate solution and argued that ecosystem restoration focused on biodiversity is essential for addressing the climate crisis.
These examples illustrate how mainstream media commonly cast biodiversity challenges through a climate change frame.Importantly, this critique arises from within conservation biology itself. As they and others have noted, if conservation scientists overemphasize climate change while neglecting direct drivers of extinction, they risk undermining the credibility of evidence-based science (see also Ketcham, 2022).
Rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and extreme weather are indeed altering the natural world. Yet the question remains: is climate change really the principal driver of biodiversity loss? Recognizing that climate change compounds existing threats, but is not yet the primary cause, is essential for designing effective strategies that address the root causes of biodiversity decline.
A recent article in Conservation Letters challenges this framing. In An inconvenient misconception: Climate change is not the principal driver of biodiversity loss, Caro and colleagues (2022) argue that while climate change is a significant factor, it is not the leading cause of species declines and extinctions. Instead, they identify land-use change and overexploitation as the most immediate and pressing threats.
For example, Caro et al. (2022) found that for amphibians listed as “extinct in the wild,” only 11% of reported cases cited climate change as a cause, while 37% cited habitat loss. The same pattern held for reptiles (12% vs. 29%), birds (3% vs. 35%), and mammals (12% vs. 37%). These data demonstrate that while climate change is a factor, it is rarely the primary driver of extinction compared with more immediate threats.
Consider the case of the Spix’s macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii), once native to Brazil’s Caatinga forests. The bird was driven to extinction in the wild primarily due to habitat destruction and trapping for the pet trade and not climate change.
Similarly, the Yangtze river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) was declared functionally extinct in 2006, largely due to overfishing, pollution, and vessel traffic, with climate factors playing only a marginal role. These examples illustrate how species losses continue to be dominated by local, human-driven pressures.
Looking at the Evidence
The authors bring together three independent lines of evidence to support their argument.
Extinctions since 1900 – Reviewing vertebrate extinctions over the past century, they found that climate change was rarely listed as a primary cause. In contrast, habitat loss accounted for three to four times more extinctions (Caro et al., 2022).
Current threats to wildlife – Using IUCN Red List data for amphibians, birds, and mammals, they found that agriculture (crops, livestock, aquaculture) and overexploitation (logging, hunting, and fishing) remain the most immediate pressures on wildlife populations.
Comparative studies – When studies directly compared climate change with other anthropogenic threats, habitat destruction, deforestation, and overexploitation were found to be more important in 61% of cases (Caro et al., 2022).
In short, while climate change is reshaping ecosystems, species are disappearing today primarily because of human-driven land conversion and exploitation.
Why the Focus on Climate Change?
The authors also critique the imbalance in both scientific literature and media coverage. Over the past 20 years, publications and headlines linking climate change to biodiversity have skyrocketed, while issues like deforestation, pollution, and overhunting receive far less attention (Legagneux et al., 2018, as cited in Caro et al., 2022).
This disproportionate focus risks skewing conservation strategies. If climate change is seen as the dominant driver, resources may flow disproportionately into carbon-centric solutions while overlooking the urgent need to protect habitats and curb overexploitation.
Biodiversity as a Climate Solution
Perhaps the most important insight from this paper is that conserving biodiversity is not only about saving species for their own sake, it is also a powerful climate strategy. Ecosystems like forests, savannahs, and wetlands actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, regulate water cycles, and buffer against climate extremes (Caro et al., 2022).
By protecting these ecosystems, we achieve a double win: slowing biodiversity loss and tackling climate change in a cost-effective, nature-based way.
The Takeaway
Caro and colleagues (2022) make a bold but necessary call: we need to refocus conservation priorities, because global assessments show that land-use change, overexploitation, invasive species, and pollution together account for over 90% of biodiversity loss, while climate change, though increasingly important, remains a secondary driver at present.
In their words, conserving ecosystems by tackling these threats is “the only available, economically viable, global strategy to reverse climate change” (Caro et al., 2022, p. 1).
References
Caro, T., Rowe, Z., Berger, J., Wholey, P., & Dobson, A. (2022). An inconvenient misconception: Climate change is not the principal driver of biodiversity loss. Conservation Letters, 15(3), e12868. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12868
Ketcham, C. (2022, December 3). Addressing climate change will not “save the planet”. The Intercept. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2022/12/03/climate-biodiversity-green-energy/
The Guardian. (2025, August 20). Monkeys falling from trees and baking barnacles: How heat is driving animals to extinction. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/20/monkeys-falling-trees-baking-barnacles-heat-driving-animals-extinction-climate?
Time. (2024). We can’t address the climate crisis without nature. https://time.com/6340530/climate-change-nature/
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With Dr. Poulomi Chakravarty
Wednesday, September 3 at 7:00 PM (Eastern Time, US)
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Poulomi Chakravarty, PhD is an Environmental Scientist and Climate Educator, who is currently volunteering as Climate and Biodiversity Research Advisor at the Biodiversity for Livable Climate. She is also the Founder of Global Climate Association and the Executive Coordination Member and Digital Platform Manager of the South Asian Meteorological Association.
We have a course coming up in October with Biodiversity for a Livable Climate. The course is all about the subject of this article: What is the relationship between wildlife and climate change? Is climate change causing biodiversity loss?
In the course Wildlife & Climate (October 9-30) you will have a chance to interact with world class experts who have studied wildlife populations from all different angles.
Please click on this link to learn more about the course and register. If you register before September 6, you can qualify for a steep Early Bird Discount!
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I totally agree with this article. We need animals in the landscape to fulfill a variety of ecological fucntions. These do not necessarily have to be wild, but can be also be 'domesticated if their behaviour resembles that of wild animals. I am talking about the locally adapted breeds managed by pastoralists. A paper on this will come out soon.