Climate-smart protected areas in drylands can effectively safeguard biodiversity without expanding boundaries

The current policy for evaluating protected areas is static and greatly limited, as it fails to account for mid-term to long-term decadal climate change impacts on species protection and ecosystem services. Here we employed an integrated multi-model framework combining system dynamics, land use simulation (PLUS), ecosystem service valuation (InVEST), species distribution modeling (BIOMOD2), and conservation prioritization (Zonation) to assess how biodiversity and ecosystem services within dryland protected areas may change over time under climate scenarios, while identifying climate refugia to explore potential design options for current protected area configurations in drylands. Our results indicate that current protected areas cover only 14 % of drylands under present climate conditions, leaving critical species and ecosystem services at risk. Considering ongoing climate change, 84.98 % of drylands are projected to remain unprotected by 2100, even under the optimistic Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP126). Through systematic conservation planning, our analysis reveals that optimizing protected areas could effectively safeguard 75 % of species and preserve essential ecosystem services within 25 % ± 2 % of dryland landscapes. Our results provide operational policy pathways suggesting that climate-smart design of protected area configurations in drylands can enhance conservation policy resilience and implementation effectiveness, thereby offering evidence-based solutions to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services under global change.