The human population grows daily, it’s on the move and it’s carving a deep technological footprint on this planet. We alter landscapes and perturb ecosystems, inserting ourselves and other species into novel regions of the world, leading to potentially irreversible changes in the biosphere. This is not news. Half a century ago, Charles Elton (1958), a founder of modern ecology, wrote, “We must make no mistake; we are seeing one of the greatest historical convulsions in the world’s fauna and flora”. This is the biodiversity crisis.

Even as our species engineers this planet, the planet itself is changing with perturbations emerging from overall warming which is accelerating over time (e.g., Parry et al., 2007). Some areas are getting wetter, some drier. Some areas are warmer, others cooler. Weather patterns are becoming more extreme – more droughts, more floods – and our ability to predict the weather as it emerges from a deeper climatological background seems to have taken a step backwards in recent years. The growing body of empirical evidence accords with predictions made by most models of climate change, which has led to even more dire predictions about the short-term future and major shifts in the structure of ecosystems and the distribution of biodiversity (Parmesan, 2006; Lawler et al., 2009; Dawson et al., 2011). This is the global climate change crisis.