Climate Change - Adaptation and Decision Support Tools
The U.S. Department of the Interior and its 70,000 employees have the expertise and a long history of developing adaptive-management strategies to protect land, water, fish and wildlife, cultural heritage and tribal resources. Climate change poses one of the most significant challenges to resource stewardship in our nation's history. Our resource managers are already developing adaptive-management strategies to respond to these new challenges. These solutions include wetlands restoration, reforestation initiatives, restoration of native species, improved water supply forecasting and many other efforts.
At Interior, we are building the scientific and organizational infrastructure to work with partners in the development of adaptation tools and the coordination of climate-change responses at the landscape level.
We are partnering to develop state-of-the-art strategies to translate science into adaptive management and to develop robust ecological-forecasting models. We are using scenario-planning and structured decision-making tools to facilitate a dialogue between scientists and resource managers throughout the adaptive-management process. We are supporting communities experiencing the impacts of climate change by reducing their risks from rising sea levels, extreme storm events, wildfire and shifting patterns of drought:
- Bureau of Land Management restoring natural ecosystems
- Office of Surface Mining program to reforest mined areas
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service strategic plans
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Climate Change Learning Center