ISSUE PRIMER

DETAILED REPORT

- - - - INTERNATIONAL

- - - - NORTH AMERICA




Managing for Change

The successful management of National Parks and protected areas is a goal that is fraught with problems at the best of times. Many National Parks are sorely understaffed and underfunded, but the continued growth in visitor numbers dictates that increasing amounts of park funds be directed to road maintenance, waste management, and visitor safety. As a result, park staff have little time to devote to long-term environmental planning, and funds for vital biological research are scarce. Nevertheless, it is essential that managers of protected areas begin to include strategies for coping with climate change impacts in their routine planning and research activities.

There are many ways in which management authorities could begin to integrate climate into their thinking. To give one example, John Peine, a scientist working on climate impacts in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, has proposed a framework for climate change sensitivity analysis that could be used by park managers with minimum additional investment of time or money (Peine and Berish in press). The analysis would be undertaken by a multidisciplinary panel of local experts and would include the following steps:

1. Definition of goals and targets as well as political and ecological boundaries for the assessment.
2. Stakeholder assessment of valued natural and cultural resources.
3. Inventory of data availability and data needs.
4. Agreement on timescale of study (including past climate analogs) and climate scenarios.
5. Preliminary natural resource sensitivity analysis.
6. Preliminary cultural resource sensitivity analysis.
7. Strategic plan for species and landscape conservation.
8. Monitoring program for climate impacts.

A program based on this methodology has been proposed to be carried out by the Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere Cooperative (SAMAB) for the the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Based on these types of sensitivity analyses, which take into account the unique situation and conditions of specific natural areas, several categories of management action can be contemplated that will help to mitigate global warming impacts. According to Thomas Stohlgren (pers. com.), an ecologist with the Biological Resources Division (BRD) of the U.S. Geological Survey at Fort Collins, Colorado, these actions should include the following:

1. Maintain or restore natural disturbance regimes (e.g., through prescribed fire) in order to minimize the impacts of climate-induced changes in extreme events such as droughts and floods.
2. Implement an ecosystem approach to management that takes into account likely climate impacts over various spatial scales. This will require multiple stakeholder involvement and an emphasis on improving or creating connectivity between habitat areas.
3. Step up efforts to control invasive non-native species such as cheatgrass and smoothbrome, which are already a problem and which are likely to benefit from climate change at the expense of native plant communities.
4. Develop and foster an "adaptive management philosophy." This will promote preparedness and allow flexible and innovative responses. Adaptive management will be needed, as climate change impacts will often be unpredictable and will work with other environmental stresses to cause new problems for park managers.
5. Expand research and monitoring activities in order to be able to identify species and habitats at risk, monitor for signs of change, and evaluate the impacts of multiple environmental stresses.

In addition to these strategies, parks should develop visitor education and public outreach programs that explain ongoing and expected ecosystem changes resulting from global warming, highlight park-based climate change research activities, and demonstrate the combined effects of global warming and other local environmental pressures. Such programs could include visitor center displays, information leaflets on climate impacts, ranger training modules, teachers' worksheets, display boards at parking outlooks where direct impacts (such as sea level rise or tree line change) can be observed, and special information and links at park sites on the World Wide Web. Almost no National Parks have yet taken this step of transferring the information gathered on their sensitivity to global change to local communities or seasonal vistors. One place where some of these outreach methods are being tried is Glacier National Park in Montana, where, for example, a short video of computer graphics has been created to illustrate changes in vegetation and the melting of glaciers caused by warming.

No amount of better conservation management will save our Arctic habitats from climate change, however. So, first and foremost, there is a need to reduce the rate at which polluting greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, are being pumped into the atmosphere. The United States and Canada are responsible for nearly a quarter of all the world's carbon dioxide emissions. In December 1997, nations will meet in Kyoto, Japan, for a United Nations Climate Summit aimed at agreeing on targets and timetables for emissions reductions. The message from this new WWF report on the National Parks is clear: There is no more time to waste C without substantial, near-term, reduction targets being agreed, the irreversible decline of many of our nations' protected areas will be set in motion.

Even with strong action to reduce greenhouse gases, some change will still occur because of the already unnaturally high levels of pollution in the atmosphere. For this reason it is essential that protected areas managers work with scientists to develop conservation strategies aimed at mitigating some of the impacts of global warming. Climate change will force the need for the most resilient protected area system we can create, and this in turn will require increased investment in conservation. Special emphasis must be put on reducing existing environmental pressures such as logging, water pollution, and habitat fragmentation as a result of roadbuilding and agricultural development. The natural areas that are the most resilient to climate change will be those where connectivity and corridors between habitat areas are maintained, and where other environmental stresses are ameliorated.

Because climate change is an added, and often severe, stress that will generally exacerbate existing park problems such as fire management, drought, floods and control of non-native weeds, park managers will require additional resources to try to mitigate its impacts. Some people have suggested that climate change will reduce the importance of National Parks because it will change the distribution of plant and animal species, and in some cases drive protected species out of reserves, or cause local extinctions in parks. In fact, the opposite is true. The current protected area system, although it will be extremely hard hit by global warming, can provide the core habitat needed for species survival if more is done to promote conservation in areas surrounding the parks.

Climate change makes it more necessary than ever to invest in the conservation of natural habitat that can provide buffer zones around parks and maintain biodiversity in the landscape. Preventing the loss of biodiversity, preserving rare habitats, and protecting parcels of land that provide natural links between reserves are all strategies that will play a major part in helping to adapt to the coming changes (Markham and Malcolm 1996). Increased emphasis on this type of ecosystystem management is likely to heighten the need for cooperation among various government agencies and local stakeholders. Working more outside the parks to mitigate climate change may increase the need for conflict resolution between conservationists and local communities, including native peoples (West 1995). However, global warming may be perceived by all stakeholders as a threat to their values or ways of life and could therefore act to bring different parts of the community together to jointly tackle a common threat (West 1995).


2. The WWF analysis was based on data provided by the Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP). The VEMAP scientists used three biogeographic models (BIOME2, DOLY, and MAPSS) and outputs from three "mixed-layer ocean" GCMs (Oregon State University, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and United Kingdom Meteorological Office) to produce nine scenarios of vegetation sensitivity in the coterminous U.S. (Kittel, 1995; VEMAP Members, 1995).