FWS Climate Change Strategy

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives

Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange

National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy

Adaptation - Safeguarding Species and Habitats

Adaptation is defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. For the Service, adaptation is planned, science-based management actions that we take to help reduce the impacts of climate change on fish, wildlife, and their habitats. Adaptation forms the core of the Service’s response to climate change and is the centerpiece of our Strategic Plan. This adaptive response to climate change will involve strategic conservation of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats within sustainable landscapes.

Service planned actions include:

• Facilitate development of a National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy to be the conservation community’s shared blueprint to guide wildlife adaptation partnerships over the next 50-100 years.

• Help create a National Biological Inventory and Monitoring Partnership that facilitates a more strategic and cohesive use of the conservation community’s monitoring resources. The Partnership will generate empirical data needed to track climate change effects on the distribution and abundance of fish, wildlife and their habitats; model predicted population and habitat change; and help us determine if we are achieving our goals.

• Build regional and field technical capacity by working with partners to provide cutting edge science and information through partnerships called Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). LCCs will be the primary vehicle through which the Service, other federal bureaus, and our partners acquire and apply the best climate change science to biological planning and conservation design for fish and wildlife management.

• Deliver conservation to the most climate-vulnerable species through various activities, including but not limited to identifying priority water needs, addressing habitat fragmentation, managing genetic resources, reducing non-climate stressors, and other resource management actions.

• Inform stakeholders on wildlife conservation issues related to energy development and energy policy and help facilitate development of renewable energy sources in a manner that helps conserve species and avoids or minimizes significant impacts to sensitive fish, wildlife, and plant species.