Sean Pang, who completed his PhD in our lab in 2022, has successfully published a chapter from this thesis about conserving Southeast Asian tree species in the face of both climate and land-use change. He modelled nearly 1,500 tree species distributions and explored how they would fare under four future climate-change scenarios involving different assumptions about human mitigation efforts. As expected, the tree species overall fared best under the most sustainable climate pathway (SSP1-2.6), but surprisingly the intermediate climate pathways (SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0) were worse for biodiversity than the least-sustainable climate pathway (SSP5-8.5). The main reason was that the intermediate climate pathways involved greater land-use change for biofuel production to support a partial transition away from fossil fuels. The results demonstrate how halfway efforts to prevent climate change can potentially have detrimental effects on biodiversity. The paper is just out in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Sean was originally a student in Edward Webb’s lab, but completed the last year of his PhD in our lab after Webb moved to the University of Helsinki. Sean is now a post-doctoral research fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Pang, S. E. H., J. W. F. Slik, R. A. Chisholm, and E. L. Webb. Conserving Southeast Asian trees requires mitigating both climate and land-use change. Nature Sustainability