Forest Service adopts climate-change ‘scorecard’

Recognizing that climate change calls for a coordinated response, the U.S. Forest Service is implementing a climate change road map to guide the agency’s efforts in the face of potentially staggering impacts to the landscapes and watersheds it manages across the country. The hope is that the plan will set the tone for how the Forest Service will respond to climate change, culturally and institutionally as an agency, to tackle a global issue with global solutions. Some first steps include completing and compiling various vulnerability assessments to determine what the greatest threats are. Input will include reports from state wildlife agencies and non-governmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy. Using a “scorecard” approach will provide a framework for individual national forests to understand what their role is in addressing climate change, regional planners said. The scorecard approach will help field-level rangers plan actions that fit into a broader scope of landscape-level action aimed at addressing climate change, rather than relying on “random acts of conservation,” said regional agency planners familiar with the effort...more