Quiet Canopies

Globally, more than half of all bird species are in decline, driven primarily by human activities such as habitat loss, degradation, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. Latin America, the world’s richest region for avian diversity, faces particularly acute risks: five of the ten countries with the highest numbers of globally threatened bird species are in this region.

Climate change is compounding pressure from land cover change by altering temperature and rainfall patterns, shifting habitats upslope or poleward, and intensifying extreme weather events. These changes are projected to cause substantial range contractions, population declines, and local or global extinctions—especially among tropical, montane, and forest-dependent species with narrow ecological tolerances and globally threatened species already in decline as designated by the IUCN. 

To understand the impacts of climate change on these globally threatened forest bird species across Latin America, Audubon compared the current and future ranges for each species to estimate the percentage of range loss and gain under multiple climate change emission scenarios. 

More than 75 percent of threatened forest bird species in Latin America are vulnerable to extinction due to climate change if we fail to meet current mitigation targets captured in the Paris Agreement and subsequent international agreements.  

However, if mitigation actions keep warming under 2.0 °C, more than 60 percent of the threatened forest bird species would move away from extinction and toward a less vulnerable status. 

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