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Consideration of climate change is therefore essential to maintain PAs effectiveness in time and space. Before joining the PARCC project, these five countries had not yet taken into consideration the full range of current and future climate change impacts in their PA plans and programmes. The PARCC project achieved a number of goals for PA programmes in West Africa including (i) collating climate data and future climate change projections, (ii) modelling the expected future distributions of bird, mammal, and amphibian species, (iii) evaluating the vulnerability of species to climate change impacts, (iv) identifying areas resilient to climate change that would be beneficial to protect as climate refuges for flora and fauna, and (v) designing systematic conservation planning systems incorporating the information mentioned above. These systems allowed to carry out gap analyses of the representation of conservation features in existing PAs and the identification of priority areas for protection, i.e., where new PAs could be established, where existing PAs could be extended and where connectivity corridors could be established or restored.
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