FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Anthony Flint
617-661-3016 x116
LEADERSHIP DIALOGUE WILL ADDRESS ADAPTATION TO IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON LAND, ECOSYSTEMS, CONSERVATION
Lincoln Institute convenes practitioners, public and private leaders for Conservation and Climate Change: Building a Framework for Adaptive Management May 27-28 in Washington D.C.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The Mountain Pine Beetle, with the help of milder winter temperatures, continues to spread across vast amounts of forest land, destroying massive stands of pines from Colorado to British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. Water shortages in the American Southwest threaten the viability of millions of acres of wildlife habitat, as well as agriculture and rural communities.
These are just some of the impacts of rising temperatures that over the next 50 years will accompany climate change, disrupting ecosystems and posing a major challenge to stewards of conservation land. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is sponsoring a leadership dialogue, Conservation and Climate Change: Building a Framework for Adaptive Management, to address such issues. The forum will bring together about 100 invited conservation executives, field practitioners and subject experts from the public, private and non-profit sectors in Washington, D.C. May 27 and 28 to consider how the conservation community can implement effective adaptation strategies to address the impacts of climate change.
“The impact of climate change is already being seen and felt on conservation lands and in wildlife habitats across North America,” said James N. Levitt, director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, and a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who organized the conference for the Lincoln Institute. “Adaptation to climate change will be a very big part of the land and biodiversity conservation agendas in the years ahead.”
To meet this challenge, conservationists are likely to consider several elements for a comprehensive adaptive management approach to the issue, such as:
• Careful observation of natural process and ecosystem dynamics, across both time and geographies
• Sophisticated forecasting and planning that will guide management actions
• Resource management action in the field – for example, new land conservation initiatives to facilitate species migration along landscape-scale corridors, new resource management programs to remove and prevent the spread of invasive species, and new water usage and fire regimes to adapt to rising air and water temperatures
• Monitoring and reassessment to understand both the expected and unexpected repercussions of management actions taken, and
• The use of new markets to facilitate rapid and effective adaptation – for example, the use of ecosystem service markets to reward sustainable forestry and the provision of specified levels of freshwater quality and quantity on a landscape-scale basis.
Framing and implementing a comprehensive adaptive resource management agenda, Levitt said, is central to America’s longstanding international leadership in the field of land and biodiversity conservation.
The conference is by invitation. Interested media should contact Anthony Flint at anthony.flint@lincolninst.edu.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., has been active on the subject of climate change, planning and land use through its Department of Planning and Urban Form, chaired by Armando Carbonell.
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