As climate change transforms our world, the impacts will be felt unequally, with some animals struggling to survive and others finding ways to overcome the resulting challenges.

This phenomenon is increasingly described as the "winners and losers under climate change," said Giovanni Strona(opens in new tab), an ecologist and former associate professor at the University of Helsinki, now a researcher at the European Commission. Strona led a 2022 study, published in the journal Science Advances(opens in new tab), that found that under an intermediate emissions scenario, we stand to lose, on average across the globe, almost 20% of vertebrate biodiversity by the century's end. Under a worst-case warming scenario, that loss rises to almost 30%.