Climate change is transforming our planet in countless ways: We are seeing increasingly frequent wildfires, more frequent and severe flooding, alterations in the flow of ocean currents and the height of glaciers. Not surprisingly, the flora and fauna that populate our natural world have struggled to keep up with these man-made changes — and that is without having to worry about humans directly slaughtering them. The end result has been a staggering number of extinctions, so many that a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report in 2020 revealed that population sizes of "mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish" had fallen by 68 percent since 1970, an "unprecedented" rate of destruction of Earth's biodiversity.
Yet the news may not be entirely bleak. Indeed, according to a new study published in the scholarly journal Science, Earth's wildlife may possess a greater ability to adapt to a changing world than previously thought. If so, this could mean that organisms have a sort of "evolutionary fuel" that will help some of them adapt to climate change.
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