In this Guide we introduce the need to adjust our approach to biodiversity conservation to account for a rapidly changing climate. Toward a national conversation, we outline some potential new principles and link them to new or revised strategic goals and potential implementation actions. We then describe a suite of new measures to assist with planning actions, all of which have been derived from the community-level models introduced in Implications of Climate Change for Biodiversity.

This Guide is intended as a reference to explain the interpretation and use of the new measures we introduce and comprises seven sections.

Section 2 offers a general discussion of the need for new principles to guide biodiversity conservation in a rapidly changing climate, and associated options for facilitating adaptation of biodiversity to climate change.

Sections 3 to 6 introduce four new measures that aim to inform the design or exploration of particular adaptation options:

• Section 3 describes measures of projected distribution of vegetation type. It provides an indication of how present-day vegetation may reorganise spatially with climate change.
• Section 4 outlines a revegetation benefit index, to suggest where revegetation actions may support the greatest diversity of species in a changing climate.
• Section 5 introduces an index describing the need for assisted dispersal, which estimates how far an organism might need to move, or be moved, to find potentially suitable habitat in the future.
• Section 6 describes a measure of refugial potential, to indicate how important a location may be as an ecological refugium through climate change, a place where surrounding species may need to retreat into.

Section 7 draws together a summary of the information provided in this Guide and linkages with the earlier Implications of Climate Change for Biodiversity.