Phoebe Barnard

• BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD
• CEO and Affiliate Full Professor at Stable Planet Alliance and University of Washington

It is a hard reality that virtually all countries, no matter how well resourced, take conservation and land use decisions based on highly patchy and imperfect data-if indeed any data at all. Despite a mushrooming of scientific evidence and journals in the past decade, and open-access provision of many expensive global datasets, developing countries...

View-point article Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequiv- ocally that planet Earth is facing a...

For leaders, planners and people around the world facing uncertainty about actions to resolve our planetary crises, we offer a concrete framework for action. We take the six core areas identified for urgent action by humanity from our 2019 paper in BioScience, World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency, and convert these into a framework for c...

We summarize the concrete, timebound and scale-specific actions (developed from the six issues we identified for urgent action by humanity in our 2019 BioScience article, World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency, with which we challenge world leaders at different scales, from households and communities to cities, states and provinces, natio...

Human development has ushered in an era of converging crises: climate change, ecological destruction, disease, pollution, and socioeconomic inequality. This review synthesizes the breadth of these interwoven emergencies and underscores the urgent need for comprehensive, integrated action. Propelled by imperialism, extractive capitalism, and a surgi...

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of ove...

‘We have kicked the can down the road once again – but we are running out of road.’ – Rachel Kyte, Dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University. We, in our capacities as scientists, economists, governance and policy specialists, are shifting from warnings to guidance for action before there is no more ‘road.’ The science is clear and irrefutable; hu...

(Replaces preprint) We have kicked the can down the road once again-but we are running out of road.'-Rachel Kyte, Dean of Fletcher School at Tufts University. We, in our capacities as scientists, economists, governance and policy specialists, are shifting from warnings to guidance for action before there is no more 'road.' The science is clear and...

Supplementary feeding of birds may have considerable ecological and evolutionary effects on bird communities. However, there is a lack of basic information on the prevalence, frequency and quality of supplementary feeders, especially in African urban areas. Here we describe the prevalence, reliability and quality of artificial nectar feeders in sub...

We briefly summarize the progress in 2020 - or lack of it - in global action to avert the worst of the climate emergency. See the paper here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-climate-emergency-2020-in-review/

We scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat. In this paper, we present a suite of graphical vital signs of climate change over the last 40 years. Results show greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, with increasingly damaging effects. With few exceptions, we are largely failing to address this predic...

The Climate Emergency, Forests, and Transformative Change We appreciate the letters by Pouliot and colleagues (2020) and DellaSala and colleagues (2020) about our recent article “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (Ripple et al. 2020). Pouliot and colleagues (2020) call for more scientists, teachers, and citizens to become engaged a...

Variation in body size, especially mass, is a function of local environmental conditions for any given species. Recent recorded decreases in body size of endotherms have been attributed to climate change in some cases. This prediction is based on the trend of smaller body size of endotherms in warmer climates (Bergmann’s rule) and it implies geneti...

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Mitigating and adapting to climate change while honoring the diversity of humans entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems. We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern. Governmental bodies are making climate emergency declarations. Schoolchildren are striking. Ecocide lawsuits ar...

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. E...

Verified and updated list of co-signatories to World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency

Supplementary material for Ripple et al., World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency, BioScience 2019

The public-domain letter in BioScience, 5 Nov 2019, with over 11,000 cosignatories declaring the urgency of the climate emergency, documenting spiraling out-of-control trends, and identifying six crucial areas in which governments, organizations, communities and individuals need to take action to avert the worst impacts: (a) ENERGY: clean energy tr...

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. We...

Biological communities are increasingly faced with novel urban habitats and their response may depend on a combination of biological and habitat traits. The response of pollinator species to urban habitats are of particular importance because all species involved in the pollination mutualism may be affected. Nectarivorous bird communities worldwide...

Stress, as a temporary defense mechanism against specific stimuli, can place a bird in a state in which growth rates and resistance to diseases are diminished. The Cape Sugarbird Promerops cafer is an endemic specialist of the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) of South Africa that may be threatened by urbanization and climate change. Ecological stress du...

The robust assessment of conservation status increasingly requires population metrics for species that may be little-researched, with no prospect of immediate improvement, but for which citizen science atlas data may exist. We explore the potential for bird atlas data to generate population metrics of use in red data assessment, using the endemic a...

Long-term datasets needed to detect the impacts of global change on southern biodiversity are still scarce and often incomplete, challenging adaptation planning and conservation management. Biological data are probably most limited in arid countries and from the oceans, where natural environmental variability ('noise') means that long time series a...

Water affects distribution of many species, but climate change is set to change rainfall patterns and hence water availability. In South Africa, various global climate-change models suggest a drier future for the winter rainfall regions with implications for survival of plant and animal species of the fynbos region. Most birds offload heat by evapo...

We present the results of our eighth annual horizon scan of emerging issues likely to affect global biological diversity, the environment, and conservation efforts in the future. The potential effects of these novel issues might not yet be fully recognized or understood by the global conservation community, and the issues can be regarded as both op...

Relationships between true population densities and reporting indices from atlas data are important for the calculation of population sizes, though these relationships are remarkably little-known and likely confounded by issues of detection. We examine issues of detection for a single-observer point-count survey across the Fynbos biome in South Afr...

The Fynbos biome is vulnerable to anthropogenic influence and climate warming. A recent study has shown that of the six Fynbos-endemic passerines, Cape rockjumpers (Chaetops frenatus) are particularly vulnerable to increases in temperatures across their range, with those occupying regions that experienced warming over the last two decades showing t...

Aim Test hypotheses that present biodiversity and endemic species richness are related to climatic stability and/or biome persistence. Location Africa south of 15° S. Methods Seventy eight HadCM3 general circulation model palaeoclimate experiments spanning the last 140,000 years, plus a pre‐industrial experiment, were used to calculate measures o...

Aim Climate change and other anthropogenic global change drivers act in complex, mutually exacerbating ways to alter the abundance and distribution of species. In South Africa, pied crows Corvus albus have increased in numbers and range in recent decades. Popular opinion links these changes to urbanisation and infrastructure development, but there...

South Africa has been pioneering the use of early warning systems for biodiversity. This has been done as a window onto the natural world to support adaptive environmental management. People are used to early warning systems for tsunamis, for economic shocks, for disease outbreaks and for drought. Biodiversity changes can be on a slower time scale,...

The Fynbos biome is vulnerable to anthropogenic influence and climate warming. A recent study has shown that of the six Fynbos-endemic passerines, Cape rockjumpers (Chaetops frenatus) are particularly vulnerable to increases in temperatures across their range, with those occupying regions that experienced warming over the last two decades showing t...

Cape Town’s spatial footprint in the apartheid era transformed the Cape Flats into a sea of low- and medium-income housing and industrial development. This isolated the “islands” of the incredibly rich fynbos mountain habitat on the Cape Peninsula and Boland mountains. These flats now prevent the dispersal of many species across the largely hostile...

In 2015 there may remain some small uncertainties about the pace and intensity of climate change, but the inevitability of storm surges and sea level rise is not one of them. Due to the warming ocean’s thermal mass, thermal expansion, melting ice, and other complex interactions between air, land and water, the sea level will rise significantly ove...

Abstract of South African Association of Botanists talk by Anina Heystek Coetzee, January 2015: Specialist nectarivorous birds are dependent on nectar sources, which are often variable in space and time. They are expected to have a spatial association with their primary food sources and may even track these resources at a landscape scale. The fynbo...

AimResource bottlenecks – periods of severe restriction in resource availability – triggered by increased climate variability represent important and little-understood mechanisms through which climate change will affect biodiversity. In this review, we aim to synthesize the key global change processes that exacerbate the severity of bottlenecks in...

Abstract Estimates of bird numbers through quantification of density and range sizes are necessary for decisions regarding conservation status, yet counts of birds are often confounded by uncertainty of detection. The status of the endemic birds of the fynbos biome is of interest due to their conservation value in a global biodiversity hotspot, the...

Resource bottlenecks – periods of severe restriction in resource availability – triggered by increased climate variability represent important and little-understood mechanisms through which climate change will affect biodiversity. In this review, we synthesize the key global change processes that exacerbate the severity of bottlenecks in resource a...

Although many hornbills are increasingly endangered by de forestation (Kemp and Woodcock 1995), large forest hornbills such as the Trumpeter Bycanistes bucinator and Silvery-cheeked Hornbills B. brevis strike the observer as particularly prehistoric and successful over the aeons at evading predators and coping with climate and land use change. It...

The South African Fynbos biome, a global biodiversity hotspot with high endemism and species richness, has six endemic bird species. These are important not only intrinsically, but also for ecological functioning and as flagships for South Africa’s economically valuable avitourism sector. Little is known about population sizes or realised distribut...

The fynbos of South Africa is renowned for its high richness of plant species, many of which are insect-pollinated. We conducted a visual survey of arthropod activity to examine how environmental factors influence activity patterns across the biome. We estimated the activity of moving medium-to large-sized Hymenoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera and Cole...

Electronic supplementary material

The protea seedeater, Crithagra leucopterus, is one of six passerine birds endemic to the Fynbos Biome, South Africa. It is the least known of these, and there is very little information on breeding and habitat use. Through nest observations and a bird ringing scheme in the eastern sections of the Fynbos, we provide updated information on habitat u...

Estimates of annual survival rates of birds are valuable in a wide range of studies of popula-tion ecology and conservation. These include modelling studies to assess the impacts of cli-matic change or anthropogenic mortality for many species for which no reliable direct estimates of survival are available. We evaluate the performance of regression...

The protea seedeater, Crithagra leucopterus, is one of six passerine birds endemic to the Fynbos Biome, South Africa. It is the least known of these, and there is very little information on breeding and habitat use. Through nest observations and a bird ringing scheme in the eastern sections of the Fynbos, we provide updated information on habitat u...

Aim To explore the magnitude and spatial patterns of last glacial stage orbitally forced climatic changes and suborbital climatic fluctuations in southern Africa, and to evaluate their potential roles in determining present biodiversity patterns. Location Africa south of 15° S. Methods Palaeoclimate scenarios for southern Africa were derived for...

The 13th Pan-African Ornithological Congress (PAOC) was held in Arusha, Tanzania, on 14–21 October 2012. The PAOC is held every four years and is one of the only Pan African conferences dedicated to a taxon. The conference gives opportunity for those working on birds in Africa to meet and get an overview of current research and discuss possible imp...

Bird-pollinated plants typically have reddish flowers, but it is not clear whether this trait can be attributed to selection by birds. Here we experimentally test for the first time the foraging behaviour of sunbirds in relation to flower colour, using the Orangebreasted Sunbird Anthobaphes violacea (Nectariniidae) and the colour dimorphic Erica pe...

The knowledge of relative performance of plants across environmental gradients is critical for their effective management and for understanding future range expansion. Pennisetum setaceum is an invasive perennial grass found along roadsides and other disturbed sites in South Africa. The performance of this grass in response to competition, habitat...

Current evidence of phenological responses to recent climate change is substantially biased towards northern hemisphere temperate regions. Given regional differences in climate change, shifts in phenology will not be uniform across the globe, and conclusions drawn from temperate systems in the northern hemisphere might not be applicable to other re...

Bird-pollinated plants typically have reddish flowers, but it is not clear whether this trait can be attributed to selection by birds. Here we experimentally test for the first time the foraging behaviour of sunbirds in relation to flower colour, using the Orange-breasted Sunbird Anthobaphes violacea (Nectariniidae) and the colour dimorphic Erica p...

Global changes are influencing fire regimes in many parts of the world. In the Fynbos plant diversity hotspot (Cape Floristic Region, South Africa), fire frequency has increased in protected areas where the mean fire interval went from 12–19 to 6–9 years between 1970 and 2000. Fire is one of the main drivers of plant diversity in the Cape Floristic...

Aim To examine potential impacts of climatic change on bird species richness of the fynbos and grassland biomes, especially on species of conservation concern, and to consider implications for biodiversity conservation strategy. Location Southern Africa, defined for this study as South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. Methods Climate response surface...

[Extract] At the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Nagoya in October 2010, the world's governments signed up to an encouragingly ambitious set of conservation targets. These included protecting 17% of the world's land surface and 10% of the oceans by 2020. The meeting also achieved its three inter- linked goals: the adoption of a...

Time is short to build the tools we need to ‘“scan the horizon” for trends in biodiversity. We have most of the right ingredients, but need a bit of investment to combine them in the right way. South Africa is in a good position with excellent biodiversity databases, some large-scale, long-term, or both. Civil society biodiversity projects are high...

People are naturally drawn to water and, although that is largely driven by survival, humans' attraction to coastal water and inland lakes and rivers reflects the strong bond between people and nature, as well as the aesthetic appeal of waterbodies. The Ramsar Convention broadly defines wetlands as including lakes and rivers, marshes, wet grassland...

In these times of rapid environmental change, cost-effective tools to track the movements and population changes of species have never been needed more. South Africa has a huge advantage over many countries in terms of climate adaptation and preparedness; we have excellent long-term and large-scale data, and we have enthusiastic civil society volun...

Many migratory bird species, including the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), have advanced their arrival date at Northern Hemisphere breeding grounds, showing a clear biotic response to recent climate change. Earlier arrival helps maintain their synchrony with earlier springs, but little is known about the associated changes in phenology at their non...

Aim To move towards modelling spatial abundance patterns and to evaluate the relative impacts of climatic change upon species abundances as opposed to range extents. Location Southern Africa, including Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Methods Quantitative response surface models were fitted for 78 bird species, mostly endemic...