The Service’s Climate Change Strategic Plan is a blueprint for action in a time of uncertainty. It calls for the Service to rise to the challenges at hand, lay the foundation for wise decisions in the future, and begin taking steps right now to begin a continuous and dynamic process of actions that will be crucial to conserving our nation’s fish and wildlife resources in the years to come.
Our work boils down to three key strategies: adaptation, mitigation, and engagement. All of our climate change work is based these three strategies. Look for the badges on each climate project profile to better understand how that project falls into the bigger picture of our national climate change strategy.
For more resources involving our national climate change strategy, visit our national site.
The Key Three: Adaptation, Mitigation, Engagement
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Adaptation - using science to prepare for change
Adaptation forms the core of our strategic response to climate change. Essentially, adaptation is planned, science-based management actions that we take to help reduce the impacts of climate change on fish, wildife, and their habitats, whether that's purchasing additional lands for species with changing migration patterns or building a berm to separate salt and fresh water. |
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Mitigation - carbon sequestration
Mitigation involves human intervention to reduce the sources, or enhance the environment's natural capacity to capture greenhouse gasses. Sequestering carbon in vegetation such as bottomland hardwood forests in Mississippi can often restore or improve habitat and directly benefit fish and wildlife. |
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Engagement - working with partners and communities
We must reach out to our own employees, local governments, national and international partners, stakeholders, and everyday citizens to seek solutions to fish and wildlife conservation. We seek to build knowledge and share information in order to increase our collective understanding of how to help wildlife resources adapt in a climate-impacted world. |
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A Florida manatee. Copyright photo used with permission of Chad Anderson. |
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