Lee Hannah

Lee Hannah is a conservation ecologist and a Senior Researcher in Climate Change Biology at Conservation International. Hannah is one of many authors who published an article predicting that between 15% and 37% of species are at risk of extinction due to climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Biography.
Lee Hannah received his B.A. in Biology with High Honors in June 1978 from the University of California at Berkeley. His honors thesis was “Renewable Energy Potentials and Impacts". Hannah received his Doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from UCLA in June 1985. His dissertation was “Protection of Hawaii’s Native Birds in Geothermal Energy Development,”. Since 2000, Hannah has been a Senior Researcher in Climate Change Biology at Conservation International. Since 2004, he has also been working as a visiting researcher and adjunct professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His classes include Climate Change Biology, Landscape Ecology, and Conservation Planning. Hannah collaborates with the South Africa National Biodiversity Institute at Kirstenbosch (in Cape Town) to study biodiversity changes as a result of global warming.
Hannah is involved in three societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Ecological Society of America, and the Society for Conservation Biology. He holds many honors and awards, including being a National Merit Scholar in 1974; Environmental Science and Engineering Class President in UCLA from 1981–82; the American Institute of Biological Sciences Congressional Fellow in Washington D.C. from 1986–87; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Science and Diplomacy Fellow, in Washington D.C. from 1987–89.
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. 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 Finally, Hannah supports lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Hannah co-edited "Climate Change and Biodiversity" with Thomas Lovejoy on climate change (Yale University Press 2005). It was honored by Choice magazine as one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles” in 2005.
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.