How Climate Change Affects Pangolins: Habitat, Food, and Survival

The pangolin conservation conversation is dominated, rightly, by trafficking. The illegal trade in pangolin scales and meat has driven all eight species toward extinction. But trafficking is not the only existential threat these animals face. Climate change is quietly reshaping the landscapes pangolins depend on, disrupting the insect colonies they eat, and compounding the pressures that poaching and deforestation have already created. It is a slow-moving crisis layered on top of an acute one, and it receives far less attention than it deserves.

The Habitats at Stake

Pangolins occupy a range of ecosystems: tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia and Central Africa, deciduous woodlands across southern Africa, and grassland-savanna mosaics in West Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Each of these habitats is sensitive to temperature and precipitation changes in different ways.

In tropical forests, rising temperatures can alter the structure of the canopy, changing humidity levels and light penetration on the forest floor. For arboreal species like the Sunda and Philippine pangolins, which rely on dense canopy cover for movement and shelter, even modest changes in forest structure can reduce habitat quality. Trees stressed by heat and drought become more susceptible to fire, disease, and die-off, opening gaps that fragment the continuous canopy these species need.

For ground-dwelling species like Temminck's ground pangolin in southern Africa, changing rainfall patterns are the greater concern. These pangolins dig burrows in soils that maintain specific moisture profiles. Extended droughts harden soils, making burrowing more difficult, while extreme rainfall events can flood existing burrows. The savanna ecosystems they inhabit are projected to shift significantly under mid-range climate scenarios, with grassland-to-bushveld transitions altering the landscape within decades.

Food Supply Under Pressure

Pangolins are obligate myrmecophages: they eat ants and termites and almost nothing else. This extreme dietary specialisation makes them acutely vulnerable to anything that disrupts insect populations. Climate change does exactly that, in several ways.

Termite mound dynamics

Termite mounds are engineering marvels, maintaining internal temperatures and humidity levels within narrow ranges regardless of external conditions. But this thermoregulation has limits. Prolonged heatwaves or shifts in seasonal temperature patterns can push mound temperatures beyond the colony's ability to compensate. Changes in soil moisture from altered rainfall directly affect mound integrity and the fungi that some termite species cultivate as their primary food source.

Ant colony behaviour

Many ant species adjust their foraging patterns, nest depths, and activity periods in response to temperature and moisture. A pangolin that has evolved to forage at specific times, following predictable ant activity patterns, may find its prey behaviour increasingly mismatched with its own. In arid regions, ants respond to drought by retreating deeper underground and reducing surface activity, potentially making them less accessible to pangolins.

Seasonal timing mismatches

In seasonal environments, pangolin reproduction and insect abundance are loosely synchronised. Females give birth during periods when insect prey is abundant, ensuring adequate nutrition during the energy-intensive lactation period. Climate-driven shifts in insect phenology, the timing of their life cycles, could decouple this synchronisation, reducing offspring survival.

The Compounding Effect

Climate change does not operate in isolation. Its effects are layered on top of the pressures that are already driving pangolin decline: industrial-scale trafficking, habitat destruction from agriculture and logging, and genetic erosion from fragmented populations. This compounding is what makes climate change particularly dangerous for pangolins.

Consider a fragmented population of Sunda pangolins in Borneo. Logging has already reduced their habitat to isolated forest patches. Trafficking has depleted their numbers. Now climate change is degrading the quality of the remaining forest fragments. The population cannot move to more suitable habitat because there are no corridors connecting the patches. It cannot recover its numbers quickly because pangolins produce only one pup per year. And it cannot adapt genetically because the population is too small and isolated for natural selection to operate effectively.

Each pressure individually might be survivable. Together, they create a ratchet effect where each turn tightens the constraints on the population until recovery becomes impossible without active human intervention.

Climate change is not a future threat to pangolins. It is a present one, operating on timescales just long enough to be overlooked in the urgency of the trafficking crisis. But the two are not competing priorities. They are interconnected forces that must be addressed together.

What Conservation Can Do

Integrating climate projections into pangolin conservation planning is still in its early stages, but several approaches are already clear:

• Protect large, connected habitats: Large habitat blocks buffer populations against localised climate impacts and provide space for range shifts. Wildlife corridors between fragments allow individuals to move as conditions change, maintaining both gene flow and access to suitable habitat.
• Monitor climate-vulnerable populations: Technology-driven monitoring can track how populations respond to changing conditions in real time, providing early warning of declines before they become irreversible.
• Prioritise climate refugia: Some areas are projected to remain suitable for pangolins even under high-warming scenarios. Identifying and protecting these climate refugia ensures that viable populations persist through the worst of the transition.
• Reduce non-climate pressures: A population that is not simultaneously under poaching pressure and habitat destruction has far more capacity to absorb climate impacts. Reducing trafficking through enforcement and demand reduction buys time for adaptation.
• Research food source resilience: Understanding how climate change affects ant and termite populations in key pangolin habitats is critical for predicting where food shortages may occur and planning accordingly.

A Threat That Cannot Be Poached Away

The trafficking crisis has a clear solution, even if achieving it is enormously difficult: stop the trade. Climate change has no equivalent single intervention. It requires systemic thinking, long-term planning, and the integration of climate science into every aspect of conservation strategy. For pangolins, this means recognising that protecting habitat today is not enough if that habitat will be unsuitable in thirty years. It means planning for species' futures, not just their present.

Pangolins have survived for roughly 80 million years, through ice ages, continental drift, and mass extinctions. They are remarkably resilient animals. But they have never faced simultaneous threats from trafficking, deforestation, and climate change, all driven by a single species. Whether they survive the next century depends on whether conservation can match the scale and complexity of the threats arrayed against them.