Climate change is causing widespread and accelerating changes in landscapes around the world. Targeted planning can help mitigate some of these problems by strategically accounting for where and how climate impacts will unfold, but integrating conservation strategies into actual planning processes can be challenging.
One powerful strategy is to focus on climate change refugia: areas that act as refuges for species and ecosystems under environmental instability, buffering them from the worst effects of a changing climate. By specifically protecting climate change refugia and keeping them connected through corridors of stable habitat, species are more likely to persist through the coming decades of change.
Stralberg, D., Lewis, D.W., Stolar, J., Kehm, G.J., Cosgrove, C.F., Morgan, D.G., Nelson, E.A., Kuntzemann, C.E., Raymundo, A., Sang, Z. and Viliani, L. 2026. Integrating climate‐change exposure and refugia into landscape planning: A practical guide. Conservation Science and Practice, 8(1): p.e70171. DOI: 10.1111/csp2.70171
New research offers a practical guide for incorporating climate refugia and climate-informed strategies into landscape planning through a five-step process:
Step 1: Identify values at risk and desired future conditions. Planners first articulate the ecological, cultural, and natural resource values most important to a region, then assess which are most vulnerable to climate change. This step also involves defining desired future conditions, setting the conservation objectives that will guide everything that follows.
Step 2: Assess landscape capacity. This step maps the landscape along two key dimensions: conservation capacity (reflecting ecological integrity and cultural significance) and climate-change exposure (reflecting the projected magnitude of future climate impacts). Areas of low climate-change exposure are identified as macrorefugia, where long-term conservation efforts have the greatest chance of success.
Step 3: Select management strategies and spatial data. Based on each zone’s landscape capacity, planners choose among four strategies: resistance, reinforcement, transition, or change. Each strategy corresponds to specific spatial tools, including macrorefugia metrics for low-exposure areas and microrefugia identification and climate corridors for high-exposure areas.
Step 4: Map priorities and identify land-use zones. Spatial prioritization tools are applied within each landscape capacity region to identify conservation and development priorities. In high-exposure areas where macrorefugia are limited, microrefugia hotspots and movement corridors become central to guiding reserve design and land-use designations.
Step 5: Monitor, evaluate, and adapt. Plans must include robust monitoring tied directly to the community and ecological values identified in Step 1. If monitoring reveals declining refugial capacity, managers can intensify refugia protection or shift toward strategies that facilitate rather than resist ecological change.
The researchers applied these principles to the Lakes Timber Supply Area Wildfire Resiliency Project in British Columbia, a ~1.5 million hectare landscape facing intensifying wildfire, beetle outbreaks, and drought. By overlaying conservation capacity and climate-change exposure maps, they identified four distinct landscape capacity zones and tailored biodiversity conservation strategies to each. In high-exposure, low-capacity zones, they used terrain and fire refugia data to identify microrefugia hotspots as priority anchors for realigned reserve networks.
Ultimately, this framework reinforces a central lesson for conservation: protecting refugia in isolation is not enough. Corridors connecting microrefugia to macrorefugia, and linking current habitats to future climate analogs, are essential to give species the ability to move, adapt, and survive. Climate-informed planning that explicitly incorporates connectivity alongside refugia identification offers land managers one of the most practical and powerful tools available for navigating an uncertain future.
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