Feds Touting Ways to Adapt to Climate Change
Adapting to climate change seems to be a big theme for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency these days.
For the second time this week, the agency has promoted a document that supports the notion of finding ways of living with a warming world. Just a day earlier, as reported by Climate Law Update, the EPA trumpeted a program to support studies of estuaries and how they might weather the new environment. Friday, it issued a 910-page tome based on studies of public resources such as national parks and forests suggesting management approaches to reducing "stressors" from climate change.
And, lo and behold, the agency concludes that some of the practices already followed to protect the resources, such as restoring vegetation along streams (such as the Iowa project pictured here), can also play a role in helping them coexist with climate change.
It's at least a somewhat hopeful take on what can be a pretty gloomy if not downright frightening prospect for the world. As recently as Thursday, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the government agency that also helped foster the new report, released another document that predicted a grim future of extreme weather featuring such wild variations as droughts and heavy downpours, excessive heat and intense hurricanes. All of that could become more commonplace "as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases," related an accompanying statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The public is looking for some answers, suggested George Gray, assistant administrator for the EPA's office of research and development in a press release announcing the newest report:
“People always say ’Don’t just tell us what will happen – tell us what we can do about it. By using the strategies outlined in this document, we can help managers protect our parks, rivers, and forests from possible future impacts of a changing climate.”
Of course, some people might say -- and they certainly have -- that the Bush administration ought to do more to control the human contribution to climate change. Witness the pasting the administration has taken from environmentalists on its attempt to distance polar bear protections from the subject of greenhouse emissions, or the criticism that has come, even from Republicans, for its reluctance to otherwise regulate heat-trapping gases under the Clean Air Act.
Still, even the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, the world body that has probably done more than any other to heighten concern over global warming, has urged countries to take steps to adapt to and mitigate the changes. The panel has strongly suggesting putting a price on carbon, such as via a carbon trading market, something Bush has balked at up to now.
The latest EPA report doesn't go there. It seems to suggest that some warming is inevitable. It notes that since "changes in the climate system will continue into the future regardless of emissions mitigation, strategies for protecting climate sensitive ecosystems through management will be increasingly important."
The document advocates adopting a dynamic "adaptive management" approach that apparently would feature giving flexibility and better information to resource managers to make decisions, such as acquiring land and water rights when needed. It also encourages more collaboration among officials, not traditionally considered a strong point of any bureaucracy.
Other generalized recommendations include focusing on ways to minimize human impact, or as the report puts it, "reducing anthropogenic stresses." It also suggests trying to protect varying forms of species or an ecosystem in hopes that regardless of the changes that occur, "there will be areas that survive and provide a source for recovery."
It advocates applying existing approaches and staff to the problem. For instance, the addition of vegetated areas, what the report calls "riparian buffer strips," along streams today helps minimize polluted agricultural runoff into rivers. Those same barriers could help to protect the streams in an era of more intense rainfall or other climate-related events.
It also suggests training existing staff to address climate problems. But at the same time, it seems to recognize that bureaucratic barriers might exist, noting:
"...a critical requirement for success of this activity would be to ensure that employees feel both valued as 'climate adaptation specialists' and empowered by their institutions to develop and implement innovative adaptive management approaches that might be perceived as ''risky.'”
(Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service)
