Recommendations from the Initiative

While each of the seven partnerships highlighted by the Resilient Lands and Waters Initiative reflect different origins, goals, and approaches to landscape-scale conservation planning efforts, they all demonstrated success in incorporating climate resilience into their efforts by bringing together diverse stakeholders, developing and using innovative tools, and learning as they go.  This Initiative has shown that a careful consideration of climate change is possible in a variety of planning efforts, and we recommend that all future landscape-scale conservation planning efforts in the United States address the challenges that a changing climate is likely to pose for meeting their conservation and restoration goals.  The lessons learned identified in this report provide a foundation of information and practices that landscape planning efforts can draw from. Building on these successes may necessitate the development of additional tools, information, or guidance. We also recommend that the Joint Implementation Working Group promote the climate resilience practices demonstrated in this Initiative, take the lead in transferring the lessons learned, tools, and practices from this Initiative to other areas, and work with conservation partnerships to identify and address specific tools, information and guidance that they may need to continue to strengthen the climate resilience of our nation's natural resources into the future.