The President’s Interagency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience’s Priority Agenda for Enhancing the Climate Resilience of America’s Natural Resources, released in October 2014, called for the identification of large-scale landscapes for conservation and restoration to build resilience to climate change. This became known as the Resilient Lands and Waters Initiative. It also directed the agencies to work with their partners to identify and map an initial list of priority areas within each of the selected geographic landscapes or regions. The Initiative supports the first National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy (NFWPCAS) goal “to build and maintain an ecologically connected network of terrestrial, coastal and marine conservation areas that are likely to be resilient to climate change and support a broad range of fish, wildlife and plants under changing conditions.”
Working together with states, tribes, and other partners, federal agencies identified seven landscape-scale Resilient Lands and Waters partnerships across the country during the spring and summer of 2015 to participate in the Initiative. These include: California Headwaters, California’s North-Central Coast and Russian River Watershed, Crown of the Continent (northern Rocky Mountains), Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands (Lakes Huron & Erie), Hawai’i (West Hawai’i, West Maui, and He’eia (O’ahu)), Puget Sound’s Snohomish River Watershed, and Southwest Florida.
On November 17, 2016, a Resilient Lands and Waters Initiative report, companion website, and press release were released highlighting the efforts of seven partnerships to build resilience of natural resources in the U.S. These partnerships demonstrate the benefits of using existing collaborative, landscape-scale conservation approaches to address climate change and other resource management challenges.
NOAA played key leadership roles in four of the partnerships. Click the links below for more detailed information:
- Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands
- Puget Sound / Snohomish River Watershed
- California’s North-Central Coast and Russian River Watershed
- Hawai’i
Finds links to partnership storymaps in the Multimedia section.
For additional information please contact: Helen Chabot or Brady Phillips.