Lee Hannah - Work

Work

Hannah’s work is primarily centered on how climate change affects biodiversity. He uses that research to see how climate change is affecting conservation efforts. Because of his work, he infers climate change needs to be strongly considered when planning conservation. Lee Hannah strongly supports creating protected areas such as parks and reserves. He is also an advocate of habitat corridors and believes they are necessary for the survival of animals (3). Hannah argues that each species have a certain tolerable range of temperature that they can handle. If a certain area that once was hospitable to the species becomes unsuitable, the species will migrate to a cooler area. Thus, habitat connectivity is needed so that plants and animals will be able to move to find suitable climatic conditions (4). Finally, Hannah supports lowering greenhouse gas emissions (4).

One of Hannah’s most notable publications was in the January 2004 edition of Nature. In the article, Extinction risk from climate change, Hannah and his coauthors attempt to predict how biodiversity will be affected by climate change (6). The study was done by computer simulations and based on the ecological law of the species-area curve, which amounts to the bigger the piece of livable land, the more species it harbors (7). The paper concluded that as a result of climate changes that will take place from now till 2050, between 15% and 37% of species will be on a path to extinction (6). Thus, all of those species will not be extinct by 2050, but they will be committed to extinction by human greenhouse gas pollution that occurs in that timeframe. The conclusions of the study are therefore based on the assumption that climate change will continue at approximately its current pace. If international policy action results in climate change starting to level-off, it would reduce the number of extinctions projected by the study (7). Critics of the study point to the all-computer simulation, saying too many unknowns in computers give skewed results. Likewise, some believe that just because living area shrinks, it is not necessarily indicative of the exact number of species that will go extinct (7). Other critics point to the fact that plants and animals are able to adapt, and though there will be an impact on life, there will not be as great an impact as this study predicts (7).

Hannah co-edited a defining book with Thomas Lovejoy on climate change, 'Climate Change and Biodiversity' (Yale University Press 2005). It was honored by Choice magazine as one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles” in 2005. It is written to cater to both specialists and those not in the scientific field. It is separated into six parts: Introduction, Present Changes, Learning From the Past, Understanding the Future, Conservation Responses, and Policy Responses (5)

Hannah authored the first undergraduate textbook on climate change and biological systems,'Climate Change Biology' (Elsevier 2010).He has authored over 50 papers on climate change and nature conservation.