Editorial: Protected areas as natural solutions to climate change

Over the past decade, climate change has developed from being the minor concern of a few protected area specialists to a headline issue influencing decision making across entire protected area agencies and networks. As an example, at the fifth World Parks Congress at Durban in 2003 there was a single workshop discussing management under climate change (Hansen et al., 2003), while by the time of the sixth Congress in Sydney in late 2014 an entire stream was devoted to the issue, with dozens of presentations and hundreds of people involved. The Promise of Sydney that emerged from the Congress includes a recognition of the need to: INVEST in natures solutions, supported by public policy, incentives, tools and safeguards that help to halt biodiversity loss, mitigate and respond to climate change (IUCN, 2014).