Adaptation strategies for biodiversity conservation: Has Australian law got what it takes?

Climate change presents a unique threat to Australia’s biodiversity. It will amplify the effect of existing non-climate anthropogenic stressors and act in its own right to accelerate biodiversity decline. New approaches to conservation practice will be needed and these must be supported by strong but flexible conservation legal frameworks. This article reviews the principal adaptation strategies supported in the conservation literature and considers the extent to which they are currently represented in Australian law. It identifies the ways in which these strategies are facilitated or impeded under current legal frameworks. To conserve biodiversity under climate change, new processes are needed for negotiating trade-offs between competing conservation goals, particularly in relation to high-intervention strategies such as assisted colonisation and ex situ conservation.