In partnership with state
agencies and federal partners, the Association of Fish & Wildlife
Agencies released a progress report describing actions taken that
collectively address impacts and future threats to fish, wildlife, and plants
from climate change. The report follows up on the publication in March 2013 of
the National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy.
Fish, wildlife, and plant
resources provide important benefits and services to Americans every day,
including jobs, income, food, clean water and air, building materials, storm
protection, tourism and recreation. For example, hunting, fishing and other
wildlife-related recreation contribute an estimated $120 billion to the
nation’s economy every year.
The progress report,
entitled “Taking Action,” uses 50 examples of ongoing and completed
conservation projects to demonstrate the tangible steps that federal, state and
tribal natural resource agencies are taking to safeguard fish, wildlife and
plants in a changing climate. Across the country, the agencies responsible for
managing fish, wildlife and plants are working with partners and stakeholders
to take concrete steps to collectively address the impacts and future threats
of climate change.
The cases described in the
report cover a diverse array of geographies and approaches for taking action
for wildlife, from mapping out central Appalachia’s most resilient forests and
streams to collecting data on Alaska’s changing coast to help communities make
conservation management decisions. Other examples include:
- Using conservation
easements and other tools to protect more than 250,000 acres from White
Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire to Moosehead Lake in Maine, providing
a connective corridor of contiguous, climate-resilient habitat
- Installing engineered log
jams and planting native trees to protect remnant spawning habitat for salmon
in the Quinault River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula while also stabilizing
streams against erosion.
- Providing online training
for natural resource managers and conservation professionals across the nation
on the fundamentals of climate science and tools for climate adaptation.
“The state perspective
has been integral to shaping the Taking Action progress report. The report
builds on and documents many of the partnership efforts underway to move
climate adaptation from planning to action across the country” said Kevin
Hunting, Chief Deputy Director of the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife. “While the report lays out priority actions being taken now, there is
still much more to be done to comprehensively address wildlife and fisheries
adaptation to a rapidly changing climate.”
The examples highlighted
in this report are not a comprehensive accounting of what has been
accomplished, but rather illustrate the diversity of projects, scales of
planning, and partnerships that can and are being be utilized across the
natural resource management sector to respond to the impacts of climate change.
These challenges include changing species distributions and migration patterns,
the spread of wildlife diseases and invasive species, the inundation of coastal
habitats with rising sea levels, changing productivity of our coastal oceans,
and changes in freshwater availability.
Development of the
original strategy was guided by an innovative partnership of federal, state and
tribal fish and wildlife conservation agencies in response to a 2010 call by
the U.S. Congress for a national, government-wide climate adaptation strategy to
assist fish, wildlife, and plants. The strategy’s implementation is coordinated
through the Joint Implementation Working Group, which is co-led by Interior’s
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife
Commission and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (representing
state fish and wildlife agencies).
The Joint Implementation
Working Group, which includes representatives from 15 federal agencies, five
state fish and wildlife agencies and one inter-tribal commission, oversaw
development of the “Taking Action” Progress Report with support from the
Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies.
