I’m a biologist with an interest in marine conservation and, particularly, how to incorporate climate change in the design of new marine protected areas to make them climate-smart.

Species-range shifts caused by ocean warming could undermine the effectiveness of marine protected areas globally. Yet, climate change is seldom explicitly considered in prioritisation plans. Therefore, on my masters’ thesis we developed an approach to incorporate climate velocity – an index of the speed and direction that biodiversity could move in response to climate change – in the design of a marine protected area network. By incorporating climate velocity into our prioritisation plan, we tried to conserve a range of marine species while preferentially placing protected areas in areas of slow climate velocity, implying species are more likely to remain within the protected area in the future.

The incorporation of climate-change metrics in prioritisation plans can inform us where to best place new protected areas so they can potentially meet conservation goals more effectively in the long-term. This is crucial as we expand the areas of the ocean under protection from 8% currently to 30% by 2030.