A rapidly changing climate is magnifying existing environmental stressors such as habitat loss and fragmentation, water quality and quantity, and the spread of invasive species. Climate change is impacting ecosystems everywhere, regardless of protected status. Firmly rooted in sound science, an adaptive, landscape-scale conservation approach and collaboration with others, the Service’s 2010 Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Changeis a call to arms and a clear roadmap for action:
“We must act boldly with the information we have, confident that we will learn and adapt as we go. And most importantly, we must act now, as if the future of fish and wildlife and people hangs in the balance — for indeed, all indications are that it does.”
The protection and management of wildlife refuge lands and waters to maintain biological integrity, diversity and environmental health are critically important to support ecological resilience and facilitate adaptation of fish, wildlife and plants to climate change at landscape scales. Ecological resilience is defined as the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. Critical conservation delivery strategies to enhance ecological resilience include maintaining or restoring the ecological integrity of existing conservation units, enhancing linkages and connectivity among units, buffering core areas, identifying and protecting climate refugia, and ensuring adequate representation of our nation’s ecological communities in the collective conservation estate.
The Service’s strategic plan for responding to climate change recognizes that adaptation strategies can be anticipatory or reactive. Anticipatory adaptation manages towards a new climate change-induced equilibrium; reactive adaptation abates the impact by trying to maintain the current condition despite climate change.
The Service primarily is employing reactive adaptation strategies. This overall approach makes sense as a means of “holding ground and hedging bets” while considerable uncertainty about climate change impacts remain and the Refuge System faces the immediate need to counter environmental stressors. Over time, uncertainty about climate change impacts will be reduced, and the vulnerability of ecosystems and plant and animal populations to environmental change will be better understood. As this occurs, the Service can shift to a predominantly anticipatory approach to protecting and managing refuge lands and waters. Maintaining or restoring habitats, ecological processes, and plant and animal populations on wildlife refuges will require reconsideration of desired outcomes as climate change impacts are more accurately predicted. Accelerated climate change will occur over the next century regardless of the successes of mitigation efforts. Therefore, reducing “non-climate stressors” to increase ecological integrity on wildlife refuges and ecological resilience at landscape scales are more critical than ever.
Targeted restoration will also be necessary in many wildlife refuge landscapes to bring an altered landscape back into balance. The word “restoration” is often associated with a backward-looking mindset, trying to return to a lost condition in the past. Instead, restoration efforts in the Refuge System should focus on strategically replacing highly altered landscapes with native plant communities to create the best possible current and future habitat for trust species. Restoration efforts that try to recreate the past may have limited success in a highly altered landscape under predicted climate change scenarios. Restoration efforts and restored landscapes should create landscape-level habitats or habitat complexes capable of supporting genetically viable populations and metapopulations of trust species, be resilient to short-term climate fluctuations and long-term climate change, recreate as many ecosystem processes as possible on the landscape, integrate partnerships with federal and state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private landowners and integrate with future acquisition efforts to strategically grow the conservation estate. Maintaining biological integrity, diversity and environmental health on national wildlife refuges and contributing to ecological resilience and climate change adaptation will require innovation, flexibility and adapting policy to changing conditions.
Recommendation: Complete a step-down of the goals in the Service’s 2010 Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change for the Refuge System that prioritizes and guides future actions.
Recommendation: Review and update policy for managing biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health on wildlife refuges. The benchmark for desired conditions must anticipate that climate-changed ecological conditions may preclude managing for historic conditions.
Recommendation: Review and update Service policies on Comprehensive Conservation Planning and Wilderness Stewardship to reflect that climate-changed ecological conditions may preclude managing for historic conditions.
Recommendation: Include climate change adaptation criteria in the overhaul of the Land Acquisition Prioritization System.
Comment below and/or move on to next section of Chapter 2- Issues, Concerns, and Systemic Challenges in Managing for Biological Integrity, Diversity and Environmental Health
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The “Managing Refuges to Support Ecological Resilience and Climate Adaptation” section is generally good, but it needs to recognize that some resistive or adaptive responses to climate change that are desirable or necessary in non-wilderness refuges may be inappropriate or not permissible in designated Wilderness. This is also a shortcoming of the “Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change,” and the “Landscape Conservative Cooperative” and “Strategic Habitat Conservative” initiatives that this Draft Vision draws upon.
Wilderness status is different, providing additional purposes, protections, and opportunities for refuge lands that need to be considered before making generalizations about how refuges could or should respond to climate change.
Wilderness expands the range of values the refuge system holds and the range of functions it can serve. One increasingly important function Wilderness can serve, when left free from actions intended to intervene, mitigate, or resist the effects of climate change, is to provide areas where we can study and understand how relatively unaltered ecosystems respond to climate change. Such areas can provide a baseline of comparison for understanding the effects of interventions elsewhere.
The “hands off” approach best meets the intent of the Wilderness Act (which did not anticipate climate change) but it is not entirely possible in all our wilderness refuges. Some have purposes, mandates, or practical realities that require some intervention, e.g. protection of endangered species or communities and resources on adjacent lands. The Service needs to develop a process for determining which of its wilderness areas will be left alone to evolve and adapt to climate change as they will, and which may be appropriate locations for actions intended to sustain or restore “natural conditions,” actions such as prescribed fire, predator reintroduction, or invasive species control.
The referenced planning and wilderness policies need more than a review and update. They need comprehensive revision to provide clear guidance for making decisions as to which approaches, actions, and research techniques are appropriate in wilderness areas in general and which are appropriate in specific wilderness areas. These revisions are needed sooner rather than later, for two main reasons. First, to ensure that Wilderness can best serve it various purposes, including its unique function as a place to understand how nature responds to climate change when left alone. Second, we need to be more clear on how climate change relates to wilderness purposes and functions because, given the urgency, irrevocable actions could be taken or commitments made that would cause underlying wilderness conditions and values to be permanently diminished or lost.
In advocating “targeted restoration,” the paper quickly takes the defensive and emphasizes that the strategy is not “backward-looking.” Yet replacing highly altered landscapes with native plant communities sounds to me like “returning to a lost condition in the past.” Given the enormity of the challenges of climate change, it will be necessary to choose strategies carefully, recognizing that, like King Canute, we will not be able to command the tides of the sea to retreat.
Roger (in his comment above) rightly notes the value at times of leaving wilderness areas free from actions intended to intervene. As Roger suggests, this can be used for comparison purposes, but it also can be used for educational purposes, interpreted to show visitors what is happening as a result of climate change. A careful choice of adaptation strategies (which will consider the impact and viability of native/non-native species) rather than “restoration” may be the best approach with limited resources and extraordinary challenges.
The four recommendations in this section provide a much needed recognition of the need to incorporate climate change in all our plans and policies. However, recommendations 2 & 3 specifying “review and update” are too timid; needed is a more comprehensive reassessment and revision of them. Unfortunately, there is too much resistance to change and revision of policies in the outfit. Perhaps as never before, climate change confronts the Service with the need to change agency culture, and get beyond the “finality mentality” of some policy folks. Let’s walk the talk of adaptive management, change policy provisions where needed, and even be open to reconsidering goals and objectives that may less viable now or in the future.
Regarding the three policies mentioned, the statements that “climate-changed ecological conditions may preclude managing for historic conditions” are important, though understated acknowledgements. Even absent climate change, the concept of historic conditions was problematic given the dynamic nature of ecosystems. With climate change, even managing for the historic range of variability (HRV) is questionable, given the rapid and directional nature of change in many refuge ecosystems. It’s not a static range, but a moving target.
Regarding the Biological Integrity, Diversity, and Environmental Health Policy, it needs to be expanded to recognize that other significant changes need to be considered beyond the historic conditions problem. The policy specifies “maintaining existing levels of biological integrity and diversity” (3.4(C )) and to “manage [species] populations for natural densities and levels of variation” (3.14(C)). These and other of the policy’s directives will simply be impossible to meet on many refuges given current climate-change predictions. A plethora of interventions (adaptive responses) have been proposed to maintain existing or “natural” populations of specific species– their expense, unintended consequences, and sustainability highly questionable. In short, the policy needs to be revised to incorporate the latest thinking and findings related to this problem and provide guidance for prioritizing research needs and making though choices. It also needs to recognize that while decisions must be science-informed, they must necessarily be value-based, requiring significant public education, involvement, and debate.
Regarding the Wilderness Stewardship Policy, it needs revision for several reasons, one of the most important to provide guidance on conflicts between Wilderness Act purposes and between Wilderness and refuge purposes that have been exacerbated by climate change. Briefly, the Wilderness Act directs us to preserve both untrammeled conditions, (e.g. wildness, free from human control and manipulation) and natural conditions (e.g. existing wildlife, habitats). Not anticipating climate change, the 1964 Wilderness Act foresaw no conflict between these two purposes. Wilderness designation was proposed or supported for some refuges because it was presumed to be the best tool for protecting focal species and their habitats as specified by their purposes. However, the recently recognized “dilemma of wilderness management” is that in some areas, both wildness and natural conditions cannot be maintained. Wilderness refuges may have mandates to perpetuate certain resources that now or in the future will require management interventions that are antithetical to preserving wildness. The wilderness policy needs to be revised to acknowledge this dilemma, and provide better guidance for deciding whether, when, and perhaps which refuges should give preeminence to one quality and compromise the other. Such decisions need to be made consciously, with the fullest consideration of potential consequences, and with stakeholder involvement and debate. These decisions should not be made ad hock, thorough the tyranny of small decisions.
Finally, consider the commitment made in the 2010 Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change, that “As a Service, we are committed to examining everything we do, every decision we make . . . through the lens of climate change.” In that context, should we consider revising our official definition of the term at the core of our refuge purpose and system mission statements: “conservation” and “conserving”? According to policy and statute (16USC 668dd), they “mean to sustain and, where appropriate, restore and enhance healthy populations of fish, wildlife, and plants . . . “
At the refuge level, this definition was appropriate for the historic vision of refuges as stable islands of safe haven for high-value species. In popular perception, “healthy populations of fish and wildlife” means some desirable or historic numbers of favored species. But where refuge habitats become unsuitable, some species can’t be sustained, and they will be replaced with other, perhaps less desirable species. Perhaps the definition should acknowledge that, both as a means of public education and to avoid making commitments we can’t, in some places, deliver on.
Perhaps a conservation definition could include sustaining historic numbers and assemblages of species in habitats that are suitable to them, and where habitats are evolving faster than resident species can adapt, conservation would include protection of the changing habitats for the species that will replace them.
Our Research Natural Areas policy needs to be updated/revised to support the Service’s new inventorying and monitoring efforts including those associated with climate change impacts.
The word “historic” is used incorrectly in the recommendations – it should be “historical”.
Historic refers to what is important in history: the historic first voyage to the moon. It is also used of what is famous or interesting because of its association with persons or events in history: a historic house. Historical refers to whatever existed in the past, whether regarded as important or not: a minor historical character. Historical also refers to anything concerned with history or the study of the past: a historical novel; historical discoveries. From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/historic
I believe that FWS should revise the current Wilderness Stewardship plan and be more consistent with the wilderness act and should be responsive to climate change. The wilderness act requires a hands off approach. Wilderness should show little if any effects of human influence. This way biological integrity, diversity and environmental health can be preserved. We should do all of this with respect to climate change to a certain degree. Many climatic influences are coming from outside the borders of the refuge system. There is so much you can do. How can you stop the glaciers from melting and climate from warming to a point where certain species of plants and animals can not exist anymore. Some things we can not change unless we go beyond the borders of the refuge system. What we can do is to have a hands off approach and preserve the refuge as found in a natural state in accordance with the Wilderness Act.