...Many of the existing efforts to protect plant and animal species across the United States rely on information about where these species currently live. For example, if a rare bird species such as the snowy plover is found in a specific location along the Washington coast, conservationists try to protect it from human development where it lives.
But as climate change disrupts the status quo, most animals and plants will need to move to cooler or otherwise more suitable environments to survive. How does this affect efforts to protect biodiversity?
A new study by the University of Washington and The Evergreen State College analyzes whether accounting for climate change in conservation planning can protect future biodiversity more effectively than current approaches, and what the costs of implementing these solutions might be. The authors found that many species of animals and plants likely will need to migrate under climate change, and that conservation efforts will also need to shift to be effective. The paper published Jan. 27 in the journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
"We are going to need to protect different places if we want to protect biodiversity in the future," said lead author Joshua Lawler, a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. "We need to think about where species will go as the climate changes, and then plan for that. The business-as-usual planning process isn't going to work."...
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We already have potential habitat - where the species doesn't currently reside - set aside for some endangered species. Just think how this could be expanded to include areas that might in the future be where species may relocate due to climate change. This is a beautiful way to expand the reach of the ESA, ain't it? I'll bet the federal agencies are already developing models to determine how these additional acreages can be identified. And, of course, you will need wildlife corridors to connect all these different types of habitat. The possibilities are endless.
3 comments:
Frank, you said the possibilities are endless or did you mean the stupidity is endless?
The possibilities for stupidity is endless.
I'd suggest there is some difference between the global warming activists being "stupid" and their leadership being clever but driven by evil; the stupid part or ignorant part is still within the category of useful idiots.
However the possibilities are in fact endless. The use of global warming to scare people into obedience is just another version of what has been attempted before. For example, in recent years the agency wildlife biologists and other activists who depend on the ESA to make their living were attempting (still are) to use the ESA to protect what they called "endangered habitats" with the same ferocity that they use to justify their jobs and demand bigger budgets with the ESA listing of species.
About 30 years ago, Dr. Michael Coffman created a map of future wilderness areas joined by wildlife travel corridors to illustrate how the UN Wildlands Project and Treaty on Biodiversity would be used to control all land uses in the U.S. Bureaucrats learned long ago that they could write and enforce regulations under the Treaty Clause of the US Constitution that could never be allowed under statute and that is no where more evident than all the regulatory actions under ESA. In this case, people (us) would only be allowed to live in specific small areas and the rest would be devoted to "nature". Coffman's map was included in testimony to the US Senate just in time and the treaty was not ratified. The map can still be found on the internet. Here is one such site: http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/articles2/wildlands_project_and_un_convent.htm
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