Safeguarding climate-resilient mangroves requires a small increase in the global protected area

Climate change and anthropogenic activities threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Climate-smart conservation plans address these challenges by focusing protection in climate-resilient areas. However, integrating climate change in the design of conservation plans is often deemed too expensive, as it may require larger networks or protecting more costly sites. Using mangroves as a case study, we evaluated the efficiency of protecting mangroves in climate-smart versus climate-naïve reserve networks. We found that climate-smart conservation plans could provide sizable benefits for relatively small increases in protected area. Moreover, transboundary plans, involving cooperation among countries, require less area and protect more climate-resilient mangroves than nation-by-nation plans. Implementing these strategies would improve the current network of protected areas for mangroves, which currently has poor climate resilience. These findings could also be applied in other ecosystems.