This planet is the home of life, born into existence and transformed over 3.8 billion years into a continuous tapestry, covering all possible places from the deep ocean floors to mountain summits. Ours is a bioclimatic world in which every organism, from bacterium to blue whale, inseparably contributes to the climate and surface conditions of Earth. This tapestry, of which we are a part, is unraveling, with its delicate patterns and motifs denigrated to near invisibility, disappearing at a rate and magnitude that rivals that of the great mass extinction events of the past (2, 3). This fading to nonexistence is making us unfortunate witnesses to the accumulated consequences of human actions over the past 10,000 years. Happily, though, we are now increasingly empowered by science and can act to abate ongoing trends and protect planetary resources before the essential threads of life’s coherence become completely eroded.
Each year since 1995, participants in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet as a Conference of the Parties (COP) to determine how best to address the increasingly harmful changes now taking place. This Special Collection of articles has been timed to coincide with the COP25 meeting scheduled to be held in Spain this year. The Collection provides comprehensive review articles and original research by leading authorities on recent advances in the study of interactions between biodiversity and climate that deepen our understanding of bioclimatic changes and can provide guidance on how best to navigate through the rapid alterations we are seeing today. Evidence here suggests that the negative impacts of climate change can be kept under control if we collectively act and, critically, use biodiversity as part of the solutions we invent. This overview provides a brief summary of the main topics addressed in the collection, each of which demonstrates how linking the management of biodiversity and climate might enable us to keep ongoing transformations in climate and biodiversity within safe operating boundaries.