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  • Review Article
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Current approaches and future opportunities for climate-smart protected areas

Nature Reviews Biodiversity volume 1, pages 284–297 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Global Biodiversity Framework’s target of protecting 30% of land, waters and seas by 2030 requires critical discussion of where to establish new protected areas. Spatial prioritization — the process of identifying priority areas — has increasingly recognized that climate change will affect the efficacy of protected areas, as species move to track shifting climate niches. In this Review, we synthesize the current climate-smart approaches: those strategies aimed at designing protected areas that are more resilient to climate change. Such approaches include protecting species’ future habitats, protecting climate refugia, protecting areas that facilitate climate connectivity and protecting areas that promote adaptation potential. To implement these approaches, challenges include uncertainty and gaps in underlying data. We provide actionable guidance for applying these climate-smart approaches in different contexts and highlight promising ways to integrate advances in climate change ecology into conservation planning.

Key points

  • Conservation planning increasingly integrates a growing breadth of approaches that incorporate the effects of climate change on biodiversity.

  • Protecting species’ future habitats by considering range shifts remains the dominant approach, but non-species-specific approaches are gaining traction.

  • No single climate-smart approach can account for climate-change impacts on biodiversity, but adopting multiple, even conflicting, approaches could buffer against effects of climate change more effectively.

  • Protecting climate refugia can serve as a strong foundation for robust climate-smart protected area networks, which can be supplemented by protecting additional areas to facilitate climate connectivity.

  • Climate-smart spatial prioritizations are feasible on land at national to subnational scales where there are detailed data, but in data-poor areas approaches based on metrics of climate change and species traits offer viable alternatives.

  • Climate-smart conservation planning could be improved by integrating approaches across spatial scales, promoting transboundary conservation planning, and exchanging ideas across realms.

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Fig. 1: Six steps to climate-smart systematic conservation planning.
Fig. 2: Current climate-smart spatial prioritization approaches.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Possingham for providing constructive comments on this manuscript. J.O.H. was supported by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). K.L.S. was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA). S.N. was supported through a QUEX scholarship, a joint initiative of The University of Queensland and the University of Exeter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science (CBCS), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Kristine Camille V. Buenafe, Daniel C. Dunn, Jason D. Everett, Lily K. Bentley, Sandra Neubert, Alvise Dabalà & Anthony J. Richardson

  2. School of the Environment, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Kristine Camille V. Buenafe, Daniel C. Dunn, Jason D. Everett, Lily K. Bentley, Sun Wook Kim, Sandra Neubert, Alvise Dabalà & Anthony J. Richardson

  3. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Environment, Queensland Biosciences Precinct (QBP), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Kristine Camille V. Buenafe, Jason D. Everett, Sandra Neubert & Anthony J. Richardson

  4. Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Anna Metaxas

  5. Ocean Futures Research Cluster, School of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia

    David S. Schoeman, Alice Pidd & Kylie L. Scales

  6. Centre for African Conservation Ecology, Department of Zoology, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa

    David S. Schoeman

  7. Centre for Marine Science and Innovation (CMSI), The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Jason D. Everett

  8. Department of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Jeffrey O. Hanson

  9. Centre for Ecology and Conservation, Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK

    Sandra Neubert

  10. Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science, Conservation International, Arlington, VI, USA

    Isaac Brito-Morales

  11. Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Isaac Brito-Morales

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Contributions

K.C.V.B. and A.P. researched data for the article. K.C.V.B., A.J.R., D.C.D., A.M., D.S.S., J.D.E., J.O.H. and L.K.B. contributed substantially to discussion of the content. K.C.V.B., with help from D.C.D., A.J.R., D.S.S., S.W.K., S.N. and A.D., wrote the article. All authors reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Buenafe, K.C.V., Dunn, D.C., Metaxas, A. et al. Current approaches and future opportunities for climate-smart protected areas. Nat. Rev. Biodivers. 1, 284–297 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00041-0

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