National climate change strategy proposed for wildlife

The United States has no national strategy for curtailing its contributions to climate change, but it does now have a partial strategy for responding to its effects. On Thursday, the Obama administration released a draft of the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy, a plan to coordinate responses to global warming across the country.

It’s been a long time coming. Congress ordered the President’s Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of the Interior to prepare the strategy back in 2010. This is just a draft put together by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA, and the New York State Department of Economic Conservation (representing state agencies) and is up now and available for public comment through March 5, 2012.

Though the final document would not be binding on any agency, it is described as a blueprint for those federal, state and tribal agencies who manage wildlife or habitat, including USFWS, the National Marine Fisheries Service under NOAA, the Park Service, the Forest Service, the BLM, Department of Defense, plus state and tribal agencies. More than 100 researchers and managers contributed to the draft.

Why do we need this? Because climate change is already having an effect.

“We’re already seeing changes,” says Mark Shaffer, national climate change policy advisor for USFWS. “In any individual case, you can’t always say exactly what the mechanism is, but the number of species that are showing shifts in their ranges either northward or upslope – it’s a pretty broad pattern. It’s the kind of thing you would expect if a species were affected to some extent by temperature.”

Such changes can be anticipated and mitigated, and an adaptation strategy helps guide protection for wildlife and plants, can guide decisions on issues such as water allocation or timber sales, and can help give some modicum of stability for resource-based businesses. Australia has already been making these documents for a decade, and the UK and Canada have them too.

“We do need to be thinking and assessing the social and economic implications of these climate-driven changes on the nation’s natural resources,” says Roger Griffis, climate change coordinator, NOAA Fisheries Service. “In the West, we’re talking about water availability. It’s challenging to decide how to distribute that water to all the different sectors that need it and want it. Including fish and the other critters. Those challenges are only going to get more severe in some parts of the country. And we should be thinking ahead.”

“This whole thing about understanding climate change really folds into a whole series of different questions,” says Griffis. “How is the climate expected to change, or how is it changing now? Then, based on that, what do we think the impact of that will be on ocean circulation or temperature? Given that, how does that play out for fish stocks X or Y or Z? Then the third modeling, or ripple, of that is: what does that mean for the fishers or the fishing communities who now fish in this place, but may now have to go 100 miles northward because the temperature moved the fish northward?”

National strategy will also help address some really sticky questions going forward. For instance, when species are threatened with eradication.

Griffis notes, “If you get to a point where you have a species of trout that depend on cold water, but the temperature is going to rise enough to where the stream won’t be able to sustain it, what actions should be taken? Captive breeding, or moving a fish northward to a river that didn’t have that fish?”

The document devotes about 40 pages to explaining the effects created — or soon expected — by climate change. It also helps coordinate goals, strategies and action in response. States like California have been preparing documents like these for years on various issues. An attempt at national coordination is a welcome change.

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