How biodiversity conservation adapts to climate change: from a cross-spatial scale framework

Climate change has emerged as one of the most significant threats to global biodiversity, and climate adaptation has become a critical component of biodiversity conservation. This paper reviews adaptive management strategies for enhancing biodiversity resilience under climate change, based on a cross-scale framework. The findings reveal that: (1) Biodiversity conservation adaptation to climate change requires a cross-spatial scale framework, which highlights the vertical interaction and interdependencies between regional, landscape, and site-level strategies. (2) Adaptive management strategies vary across spatial scales. At the regional scale, dynamic planning based on assessment and monitoring is prioritized. Landscape-scale initiatives emphasize protected areas as the core, expanding their scope while restructuring networks through corridors, stepping stone, habitat matrix permeability, and climate refugia. At the site scale, efforts focus on in situ and ex situ conservation of keystone species, along with real-time monitoring of invasive species. (3) Future challenges in biodiversity conservation under climate change may include social inequity in adaptation efforts, delayed responses in dynamic landscape conservation planning, disruptions to species’s ecological networks, barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration, and insufficient attention to human-climate interactions. By highlighting the differential application of adaptation strategies across spatial scales and underscoring the critical importance of cross-scale collaboration, our findings provide important insights for advancing research and practice in biodiversity adaptation to climate change, offering a theoretical foundation and practical guidance for developing multi-level, operable climate-adaptive conservation policies.