As climate change accelerates, an increasing number of plants and animals will be thrown against the ropes. Models indicate up to 30 percent of species are at high risk of extinction due to climate change by 2100. Environmental shifts, scientists say, will happen too fast for many species to migrate to areas with more comfortable conditions. To make matters worse, human infrastructure in the form of highways, farms, and cities now block many natural migration corridors.
To prevent extinctions, some scientists have proposed moving species to new habitats they won’t be able to reach on their own. Also known as assisted migration, assisted colonization, and managed relocation, the idea of giving plants an animals a ride to new ranges for conservation purposes has begun to gain traction. For example, in 2013, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released “Guidelines for reintroductions and other conservation translocations.”
In what might be considered a more ad hoc effort, citizens have taken matters into their own hands. Natural populations of Torreya taxifolia, a conifer native to Florida, have nearly stopped reproducing due to a fungal pathogen. Concerned that global warming is exacerbating the tree’s demise, volunteers are now planting fungus-free saplings in forests from North Carolina to New York.
Not everyone, however, is on board with this degree of tinkering. Examples of intentional translocations gone awry abound—think of the cane toad in Australia, feral pigs in California, and kudzu in the American South, to name a few. These catastrophes happened because we can’t predict with confidence which species will play well with residents, and which will morph into invasive species.
Those who frown on actively moving organisms, however, can be more comfortable with shoring up the climate resilience of species in other ways. For example, in the Sierra Nevada, scientists sought to identify which of 17,000 high elevation meadows had experienced the least temperature changes over the past century, as these sites could function as climate refuges for native species. They also analyzed genetic connections between each meadow’s resident Belding’s ground squirrels. Sites with the most squirrel family lineages, they reasoned, are the most connected and reachable by animals looking to relocate, and are worthy of conservation prioritization.
Climate resilience is now shaping plants selected in both wetland restoration and art projects. To select species for restoration sites around the Bay Area, Point Blue’s Students and Teachers Restoring A Watershed (STRAW) project uses a matrix that considers conditions species can withstand (such as drought and fire) and characteristics such as when they provide food to wildlife. This approach has produced a more diverse palette of plants that can tolerate a broader range of environmental conditions while supplying herbivores throughout the year.
And at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, environmental artists Heley Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison have embarked on a 50-year project to plant native species at higher elevations than they are typically found in to help them become resilient to warming and the effects of altitude.
As the idea of assisted migration has taken hold, even governments have been getting into the act. Since 2009, the forestry ministry of British Columbia has been planting many thousands of seedlings from more than a dozen timber species outside their natural climate ranges in plots from the Yukon to southern Oregon. The idea is to see which will survive under what conditions. In the meantime, the BC government has also been authorizing timber companies to replant tree species up to 1,600 feet higher than their current native range.
Such experiments will take decades to produce results, but with climate change advancing each year, there’s no time like the present to get started. KMW
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.