Should potential for climate change refugia be mainstreamed into the criteria for describing EBSAs?

The world's oceans are subject to the influence of climate change at all latitudes and
depths. There is a growing body of literature on the responses of species to climate
change, which has a strong deterministic component indicating that responses can be
predicted. At the same time, advances in oceanographic data acquisition and modeling
have facilitated the identification of potential climate change refugia. The Convention
on Biological Diversity's “Voluntary Specific Workplan on Biodiversity in
Cold-Water Areas within the Jurisdictional Scope of the Convention” explicitly calls
for the identification and protection of refugia in cold-water areas.We propose adding
“Climate Change Refugium” as an integral consideration for identification of Ecologically
or Biologically Significant Marine Areas (EBSAs). We provide a description
of this as a potential eighth criterion. We then briefly discuss the pros and cons of
introducing this eighth criterion, or an alternative strategy to develop guidelines that
explicitly link refugia to the rationale of existing EBSA criteria, in the hope that this
opinion piece will launch further discussion on this notion.