Antinuclear

By Peter Hannam

As if humans weren’t making it hard enough for the world’s creatures great and small.
Evidence continues to mount that global warming is having an impact on ecosystems across the planet in a myriad of ways, altering both individual species and ecological communities.

There’s really nowhere on earth where the natural systems are not being affected by climate change,” Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University, said.
“Climate change is simply an additional stress on already stressed ecosystems,”

Professor Hughes said, listing habitat loss, pollution and over-exploitation among the existing challenges.

A recent paper in Science said research on 94 core ecological processes and found 82 per cent were already revealing climate change impacts as temperatures warmed.
James Watson, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland and one of the paper’s authors, said people often fixated on polar bears, penguins or another emblematic species.