A framework for the identification of hotspots of climate change risk for mammals

As rates of global warming increase rapidly, identifying species at risk of decline dueto climate impacts and the factors affecting this risk have become key challenges inecology and conservation biology. Here, we present a framework for assessing threecomponents of climate-related risk for species: vulnerability, exposure and hazard.We used the relationship between the observed response of species to climatechange and a set of intrinsic traits (e.g. weaning age) and extrinsic factors (e.g. pre-cipitation seasonality within a species geographic range) to predict, respectively, thevulnerability and exposure of all data-sufficient terrestrial non-volant mammals(3,953 species). Combining this information with hazard (the magnitude of projectedclimate change within a species geographic range), we identified global hotspots ofspecies at risk from climate change that includes the western Amazon basin,south-western Kenya, north-eastern Tanzania, north-eastern South Africa, Yunnanprovince in China, and mountain chains in Papua-New Guinea. Our frameworkidentifies priority areas for monitoring climate change effects on species anddirecting climate mitigation actions for biodiversity.