Study: Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions.

From a study published yesterday (18 June 2026) in Nature Climate Change, “Climate change may soon cause a catastrophic loss of global biodiversity”. From the abstract:

For decades, tropical species have widely been considered more vulnerable than temperate species. However, some studies have suggested the opposite.

Using a global-scale dataset from resurvey studies spanning 5,151 plant and animal species encompassing 39,157 sites, we show that climate-related local extinctions were significantly more frequent among temperate (49% of surveyed species) than tropical species (33%).

We then tested whether these more frequent temperate extinctions were explained by greater sensitivity to warming among temperate species, by faster warming at higher latitudes, or both. We found that extinction probabilities increased significantly with the magnitude of recent warming in temperate regions, and that temperate species also showed a general trend towards higher sensitivity to warming.

Overall, our findings challenge the long-held view that climate change more strongly impacts tropical species and suggest that temperate species are increasingly vulnerable.

Link.