Climate Change

Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change (Disruption)

Restoring and protecting connectivity is critical to saving biodiversity in North America, particularly as human pressures on the landscape continue to fragment wildlife habitat, and as climate change disrupts the ecological balance.  Over long time frames, the global climate has always fluctuated.  Today, however, we are witnessing a radical disruption in climate at an unprecedented rate, and civilization is the cause.

In order to protect nature for the long-term, we need to practice “adaptive conservation planning” – implementing, evaluating, and revising our strategies as climates change in ways that challenge most plant and animals species. Adaptive conservation planning is leading to an overhaul in how we are protect and restore the land. There are two frames: mitigation – actions to reduce the cause of the problem, such as drastically cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions; and adaptation – actions to assist nature in adapting to inevitable change. Both are serviced by Wildlands Network’s overarching goal of protecting continental-scale connected networks of conservation lands.

A climate disruption report we recently commissioned provides a comprehensive look at the relationship between connectivity conservation and climate disruption, and recommends key mitigation and adaptation strategies. Read more.

Climate Disruption Facts    

During the last century, global temperatures have risen by an average of 0.7° Celsius (1.3° Fahrenheit), the largest increase in at least one thousand years and, based on International Panel on Climate Change calculations (IPCC), at a pace considerably faster than any previous major warming period. Driving these changes are increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases, concentrations of which are 12 times greater today than a century ago. Carbon emissions result primarily from our use of coal, oil, and gas for energy, but also from farming, livestock and the burning and conversion of our forests for other land uses. Deforestation alone currently generates up to 20% of anthropogenic carbon emissions, although this is expected to decline as industrial production increases.

Unless action is taken to dramatically reduce these emissions, the Earth is projected to warm by another 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.5 to 10.44° Fahrenheit) during this century. By comparison, the most recent Ice Age was 5 degrees Celsius cooler than now. Even if we were to stop burning fossil fuels today and reforested large areas, scientists warn that the planet will continue to warm for decades to come. Momentum in the global climate system, driven by strong positive feedbacks such as melting glaciers and polar ice caps reflecting less sunlight, or warmer conditions causing higher rates of drying out of formerly moist ecosystems, will continue to increase global temperatures.

On a day-to-day basis, many of the changes occurring in nature are imperceptible. Over time, however, they will add up to broad and sweeping redistributions of animals and plants as entire ecosystems disappear and/or reconstitute themselves. This is not unnatural of course, but the speed with which these changes are occurring is unprecedented and accelerated. Our wildlife and wild places are facing a race against time for which they are not adapted, and many species will likely disappear – if we don’t act now.

We have seen what historic changes in climate have done to the megafauna our children can only embrace in cartoons or as stuffed toys (mammoths, for example). Today, we face extinctions larger than those seen at the end of the Ice Age. Thus, we have to plan for dramatic geographic shifts in plant and animal populations.  Wildlands Network and our partners are suiting up for the job.

Adapting Conservation to a Changing Climate

Until very recently, even the most astute conservation planners were implicitly assuming that the landscape was static--that places which are ecologically important and diverse will remain so into the future. This perspective has changed.  Not only must we plan to protect present-day distribution of animals and organisms, we also have to figure out what places will be ecologically critical in the future, due to climate disruption.

This means we need to use the most advanced modeling tools to predict what a rapidly changing climate will do to refashion the landscape and thus the locations and movements of wildlife.  To do this as accurately and quickly as possible, Wildlands Network is working with a larger-than-ever network of stakeholders in hopes of providing a sound plan for averting the pending mass extinctions.

The science of predicting conditions of ecosystems and habitats is young, and conservationists have had little chance to apply this science to conservation planning. We have been working with scientists at the California Academy of Sciences and colleagues within our partner groups to model predicted future climate and distribution scenarios.

Through a Science & Mapping Advisory Group formed at the recent Western Conservation Summit, we will be providing a forum for conservationists working on this subject to share and coordinate their projects. Wildlands Network and the Wildlife Conservation Society also co-convened a small group of conservation planning experts at a workshop in Boulder, Colorado titled Best Science for Conserving Wildlife Habitats and Connectivity.

The overarching goal of the workshop was to discuss what the latest science tells us about protecting crucial wildlife habitat and connectivity for terrestrial and freshwater systems. There was agreement that old conservation planning criteria such as representation of particular communities or ecosystems are becoming irrelevant. This is because climate disruption will recombine species in totally new combinations on the landscape. 

Of greatest importance now is to develop strategies which will allow nature the flexibility and room for species range shifts, broad scale dispersal, adjustment of migration paths, and other changes associated with climate disruption and expanding land use by humans. One way that animals and plants respond to changes in their environment is through dispersal, packing up and moving on. This is different and more permanent than migrations, which are seasonal, repeated movements between locations.

You could say that humans who are snowbirds, retreating to southern states for the winter but returning north in the summer, are migrating. But when someone says "I've had it with winters; I'm staying in Florida, they have dispersed." The problem is that most kinds of plants and animals don't have airplanes, nor can they easily overcome barriers like cities, dams, interstates, deforested lands and overgrazed grasslands lacking forage and cover.

Due to climate disruption, we are already seeing species disperse; or too often, disappear; as climate belts shift pole-ward and upslope, leaving them stranded in sub-optimal habitat.This trend will almost certainly continue as climates continue to change.

There is a major solution available that is simple and cheap; provide extensive connectivity across the landscape through new protections and more wildlife-friendly land management practices. Where we provide the room to roam, we also promote resilience and robust biotic communities.

We are beginning to witness unprecedented cooperation of national conservation organizations, federal agencies, climate experts, scientists, anglers, farmers, private land owners and local grass-roots environmental groups.  As this synergy builds in the conservaton world, it is crucial that the science-based orgnaizations work with conseration planners at all levels to fill knowledge gaps on species and ecosystem responses to climate disruption.