Rapid decline of Caspian Sea level threatens ecosystem integrity, biodiversity protection, and human infrastructure

Abstract

The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest landlocked waterbody, providing habitat for hundreds of endemic and migratory species, along with ecosystem services that sustain millions of people. Global warming is projected to drive declines in water levels of up to 21 m by 2100. Using geospatial analyses, we assessed the impact of sea level decline on habitats, protected areas, and human infrastructure. We show that a water level decline of just 5–10 m will critically disrupt key ecosystems (including habitats for endemic Caspian seals and sturgeon), reduce existing marine protected area coverage by up to 94%, and render billions of dollars of civil and industrial infrastructure obsolete. Replacing traditional static conservation planning with a pre-emptive, dynamic approach that allows protected areas to track shifting ecosystems, is recommended to help endemic Caspian Sea biodiversity adapt to these changes, and to avoid conflicts with mitigation efforts directed at protecting human activities.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Court, R. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3247-2550 Lattuada, M. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7983-1429 Shumeyko, N. https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8072-4561 Baimukanov, M. Eybatov, T. https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5229-5694 Kaidarova, A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0541-4272 Mamedov, E.V. Rustamov, E. Tasmagambetova, A. Prange, M. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5874-756X Wilke, T. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8263-7758 Hassall, C. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3510-0728 Goodman, S.J. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4118-8575
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 13 March 2025 Published (online): 10 April 2025 Published: 10 April 2025
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	15 Apr 2025 14:40
Last Modified:	15 Apr 2025 14:40
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1038/s43247-025-02212-5
Related URLs:	Dataset
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:225417