Safeguarding climate-resilient mangroves requires only a moderate increase in the global protected area.

ABSTRACT: Climate change and anthropogenic activities threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Climate-smart conservation plans address these challenges by ensuring protection of some climate-resilient areas. However, integrating climate change in the design of conservation plans is often deemed too expensive, as it may require larger networks or protecting more costly sites from a conservation perspective. Using mangroves as a case study, we evaluate the efficiency of protecting mangroves in climate-smart versus climate-naïve reserve networks. We find that climate-smart conservation plans could provide sizable benefits (13.3%) for relatively moderate increases in protected area (+7.3%). Moreover, transboundary plans, involving cooperation among countries, require less area and protect more cli

SUBMITTER: Dabala A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12949150 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature