The Challenge of Climate Change
The Earth’s climate is changing at an accelerating rate that has the potential to cause abrupt changes in ecosystems and increase the risk of species extinction. Climate change transcends the Service and the National Wildlife Refuge System and poses one of the largest conservation threats of the 21st century.
Climate change has very likely increased the size and number of wildfires, insect outbreaks, pathogens, disease outbreaks and tree mortality in the interior West, the Southwest and Alaska. In the aquatic environment, evidence is growing that higher water temperatures resulting from climate change are negatively impacting cold- and cool-water fish populations across the country. Along our coasts, rising sea levels have begun to affect fish and wildlife habitats, including those used by shorebirds and sea turtles that nest on our coastal national wildlife refuges. Ocean acidification and coral bleaching events represent major threats to marine life in more than 50 million acres of refuge waters and beyond.
We acknowledge climate change will be a cross-cutting theme as we continue to work with the conservation community to develop and implement conservation strategies. We also recognize that a changing climate interacts with other ongoing environmental threats and stressors such as destructive fires, water shortages, invasive species and disease transmission. The Service is committed to taking a holistic approach to assessment and management that accounts for interactions between climate change and other stressors.
Our mandate to conserve and manage Refuge System lands and waters to maintain biological integrity, diversity and ecosystem health helps to support ecological resilience and provide fish, wildlife and plants opportunity to adapt to climate-changed landscapes. But it is not enough to respond to this most urgent conservation challenge. The Service is working in partnership with state fish and wildlife agencies and other federal partners on a national fish, wildlife and plant climate-adaptation strategy. The National Wildlife Refuge System can contribute significantly to this emerging strategy through its land protection, land management, inventory, monitoring, and research efforts.
BOX: Ecological resilience: The capacity of a system to resist and recover from natural or human-‐caused disturbances. Resilient systems can maintain their essential structure in the face of floods, fires, pest outbreaks, pollution and other stressors.
Strategies that will enhance ecological resilience and provide opportunities for fish, wildlife and plants to adapt to climate change include maintaining or restoring the ecological integrity of existing refuges and other protected areas, enhancing linkages and connectivity among protected areas, buffering core protected areas with conservation efforts on private working landscapes, identifying and protecting climate refugia, and ensuring adequate representation, size and redundancy of ecological communities in the collective conservation estate. The Refuge System can contribute to all of these efforts.
The Service developed a strategic plan for responding to climate change in 2010. This far- reaching and visionary plan emphasizes reactive approaches in the short term. Although planning and management at the refuge and landscape scale will continue to be important, we must recognize that, over time, these will be new habitats, new ecosystems and new landscapes. If the Refuge System is to continue to fulfill its mission, we must undertake a comprehensive assessment of the challenges that climate change poses. Such assessments will allow us to better understand the vulnerability of ecosystems and plant and animal populations to environmental change. As this occurs, the Service can shift to a more proactive approach to conserving and managing refuge lands and waters.
Targeted restoration will also be necessary in many wildlife refuges to bring altered landscapes back into balance. Restoration efforts should create landscape-level habitats or habitat complexes capable of supporting viable populations of target species; be resilient to short-term climate fluctuations and long-term climate change; restore as many ecosystem processes as possible on the landscape; integrate partnerships with other agencies, groups and private landowners; and integrate with future acquisition efforts.
The Refuge System also needs to quantify and reduce its overall carbon footprint. Refuge system operations and facilities generate heat-trapping gases and have other impacts on the environment and wildlife. The Service’s stewardship of the Refuge System should provide cutting-edge leadership in reducing carbon emissions and implementing sustainable business practices. Our plans should include prioritizing land restoration activities that effectively sequester carbon.
Recommendation 2: Develop a climate change implementation plan for the National Wildlife Refuge System that steps down from Service’s 2010 strategic plan and assesses the vulnerability of the System’s habitats and species to climate change as well as provides specific recommendations for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
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