Resilient Habitats: protecting the wild from all the usual dangers - and from global warming

Climate change - global warming - gives us new reasons to protect wild places. Conservation biologists have told us for decades that we need to preserve large wild core areas and to link them together with corridors to protect wildlife from the impacts of human development. Now over a million species worldwide are at risk due to climate change, and protecting large wild places and linked corridors is one of the best strategies for their survival.

Why climate change demands more protected habitat

Climate change stresses wildlife through alterations to its habitat. As weather warms, forests dry up and are more susceptible to insect infestations and fire; snowpack is reduced and runoff happens earlier; rivers, lakes, and marine environments heat up; grasslands become drier; coral bleaches and dies; and ecosystems start to collapse and shift. Critters (and plants!) may need to be able to move, most often northward or upward, in search of cooler habitats. For some alpine species, like the pica and ptarmigan, there is no escape to higher elevation. In the American West, extensive roadless areas on public lands provide the best habitat and potential wildlife movement corridors - especially when combined with existing wilderness and park areas. When roadless areas are joined together into a "connected continental network of large core protected areas and corridors between them" they really help wildlife adapt to changing climates.

Habitat may be lost to fires, which are expected to increase as weather becomes warmer and drier, and as insect infestations spread to higher elevations. Roadless lands can make it easier for wildlife to relocate if fires shrink habitat. Further, in roadless areas human-caused fires may be less likely to start. The U.S. Forest Service has practically become the U.S. Fire Service, with fire-fighting now its largest budget item.

Fire intervals in Nevada are decreasing. From historic 200-year or longer intervals to 10 - 20-year intervals in lower-elevation sagebrush. This decrease favors non-native species like flammable cheatgrass and doesn't let slower-growing sagebrush get established. Such habitat conversion threatens sage-dependent species such as sage grouse, sage thrasher, vesper sparrow, and pygmy rabbit; deer are losing critical winter range.

Australia now plans to establish a continent-spanning wildlife corridor "to allow animals and plants to flee the effects of global warming." The 1740-mile "spine" is to link Australia's southern snow-covered Alps with the tropical north. It is to link national parks, state forests, and other government land, but since these lands do not cover enough of the continent, voluntary conservation agreements with private landholders will be essential.

Of course, global climate change is far from the only cause of stress to wildlife habitat, "We need to continue our vigilance against off-road-vehicle incursions, overgrazing, poisoning of water from mining or toxic herbicides, clearcutting, and other damaging human activities everywhere," says Jerry Sutherland of the Sierra Club's national Conservation Governance Committee. "Mitigating or eliminating these stresses will make it easier for species to adapt to the new stress from climate change and remain resilient."

Club to focus on "Cool Habitats"

As the Sierra Club strives to curb global warming and move to clean-energy solutions, wilderness activists also emphasize the importance of our traditional efforts to preserve threatened wildlands.

To help connect our wildlands advocacy with the new global-warming campaign, associate executive director Bruce Hamilton has helped prepare a major new "Resilient Habitats" objective, framing protection of wild places and wildlife habitats in terms of the need to combat changes brought about by global warming.

The Sierra Club Resilient Habitats initiative emphasizes big protected areas, ecosystem-scale megacorridors such as the "Yellowstone to Yukon" initiative. Smaller-scale land-preservation designations can be part of a bigger scheme if they are strategically located to connect to other protected areas. We should give highest priority to setting aside wild places that can be linked to others.

As Bruce puts it, we will "build on the existing system of U.S. protected areas (wilderness, parks, wildlife refuges, etc.) to establish an ecologically based network of protected areas, corridors, and buffer zones spanning federal, state, and private lands and waters that will preserve the full range of biodiversity from the adverse impacts of climate change."

A key concept to promote is ecosystem resilience - the ability of species and ecosystems to adapt to and withstand climate change. We make our natural ecosystems more resilient by having them connected by biological corridors to allow the interchange of genetic material.

How will the new campaign differ from our past work? Bruce points out, "Historically we've protected wild places by defending the Endangered Species Act, passing new wilderness and parks bills, cutting the budget for logging, blocking oil and gas and coal leasing, etc. These are all still important. But this proposal suggests putting a Climate Recovery Campaign frame on our overall lands-protection agenda to unify it and make sure that the solutions we advocate not only protect roadless areas, endangered species, and scenic areas, but also will enable ecosystems and the full range of biodiversity to survive climate change. In doing this we are insuring the survival of our 100-year investment in protecting the earth's wild places."

Vicky Hoover, with help from Bruce Hamilton, Jerry Sutherland, Jill Workman, and Jim Catlin