PLEA Network

17 February 2016, The Guardian, The key to halting climate change: admit we can’t save everything. Climate change, and human resistance to making the changes needed to halt it, both continue apace: 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history, we may be on the brink of a major species extinction event in the ocean, and yet political will is woefully lacking to tackle this solvable problem. Given these dire ecological trends, limited public funding and legislative gridlock, the time is ripe for a budget-neutral, executive-branch approach for managing our natural resources: triage. A science-based triage approach should be used to classify areas and species into one of three categories: not at immediate risk, in need of immediate attention or beyond help. Refusing to apply triage implicitly assumes that we can save everything and prevent change, which we cannot. Prioritization will occur regardless, just ad hoc and shrouded. This triage system would replace the status quo of inadequately managing our full portfolio of over 1m square miles of public land and 1,589 threatened and endangered species. For areas or species not at immediate risk, we can delay action while monitoring to detect changes in that status. For example, increased temperatures and prolonged periods of drought may increase both wildfires and populations of tree-killing beetles in forests of the Pacific north-west. Knowing this, we can track these variables and explore management options that minimize risk without prematurely devoting disproportionate resources. For areas needing immediate help, we must act now. For the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and US Virgin Islands, all anthropogenic impacts (such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development) must be dramatically reduced. Otherwise, because the health of these coral reefs is currently so compromised, they are unlikely to survive the sea level rise, rising ocean temperatures and increasing acidification resulting from climate change. For species protections, it would be wise to focus on keystone species such as oysters (water filterers), parrotfish (algae eaters on overgrown coral reefs), bees (pollinators) and wolves (key predators). For areas we can no longer maintain, we must make the most difficult of choices – give up, and accept that change is not always preventable. In Alaska, it may be too late to prevent the climate change-induced shift from coniferous-dominated to deciduous-dominated stands, with unfortunate impacts on forest-dwelling species and the logging industry. In the ocean, entire fisheries can be lost from an area when species shift due to warming waters. Read More here