Emerging issues and future perspectives for global climate change and invertebrates

‘Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’ is a long standing quip of uncertain origin (often misattributed to Mark Twain). As Bloom (2010) points out, however, the second part of this sentence is now inaccurate since anthropogenic influences are affecting our climate and long-term weather patterns. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the latest IPCC report (IPCC, 2014) states that there is a clear human influence on the climate and declares that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since 1950, with the level of confidence having increased since the Fourth IPCC Report in 2007 (IPCC, 2007). Climate change research has evolved with each IPCC report with new issues and perspectives coming to the fore, many of which pertain to invertebrate biology. In this chapter, we aim to identify emerging issues from the proceeding chapters, and put forward future perspectives in global climate change and invertebrate biology research.