Protecting More Wilderness Will Play Key Role in Any Climate Change Solution

The reality of climate change means that protecting wilderness is more important now than ever before. Forests and plants store carbon and help create clouds offering some of our best hopes for moderating climate changes and helping to sustain the plants, animals, birds, clean water and air, and recreational opportunities that are important to all life on the planet. The Wilderness Society explains it this way:  maintaining healthy, intact ecosystems is one of our best options for helping wildlands and the species that depend on them adapt to climate change, and for sequestering carbon emissions. America’s public lands include some of the nation’s most intact and diverse ecosystems, including wilderness.The American people have protected these landscapes for more than 100 years since the first national parks, refuges and monuments were created. Now, that work must be done with increasing urgency. New funding is needed to restore and better manage public lands where global warming’s impacts will be felt most severely, and to set aside additional lands to assure that key ecosystems and wildlife corridors are protected. Agencies must gather the best scientific information and be required to manage the lands in their care to adapt to climate change. If these resources are made available quickly, our nation’s lands will be protected, and also will help to protect us from the ravages of climate change.[1]

Montana, Wyoming and Idaho: Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Anchored by America’s first National Park, Yellowstone, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem encompasses park an

d forest lands in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Climate change poses significant threats to the area’s forests, streams, fish and wildlife. As in the Sierra Nevada and the North Cascades, earlier melting of high-elevation snowpack is reducing stream flows throughout the region. Higher water temperatures are depleting trout habitat. Warmer temperatures are expected to cause a loss of wildlife habitat, and the region already is experiencing a higher incidence of severe wildland fires and loss of alpine areas. Whitebark pine trees, a key fall protein food source for grizzly bears, are being lost to pests that are invading higher elevations as temperatures warm. New funding will be needed to acquire private forests or other lands in order to ensure an adequate winter range and to accommodate changing wildlife migration routes. Funding also is needed to ensure connectivity between habitats, and to protect and restore key habitats used by wildlife.[2]

According to the USDA Forest Service, Wilderness is critical in helping society adapt to climate change by reducing the adverse effects of change on ecosystem services and values. Climate change will cause species to move to environments where they are better adapted. If species are unsuccessful in migrating to a suitable environment, we will see increasing extinction rates and loss of biodiversity. Wilderness lands provide undisturbed corridors and elevation gradients in an otherwise fragmented landscape for species migration. They also provide valuable genetic reservoirs necessary for restoring a depleted biota. Finally, they provide substantial scientific benefits—places where ecological lessons can be learned and used to develop adaptation strategies across the full spectrum of lands from the urban interface to wilderness. For example, many of the lessons learned about wildland fire use—now being applied outside wilderness—were first learned in wilderness. Similarly, much of our knowledge about past climates—useful in learning how to adapt to change—has come from old trees, wood and pollen cores that increasingly can only be found in undisturbed wilderness lands. Long-term studies of species distributions—also best studied in wilderness landscapes--will be critical to understanding how species can adapt to change. The difficulty of stewarding wilderness given rapid climate change, the importance of proper wilderness stewardship to adaptation, and the scientific value of wilderness all suggest an urgent need for increased scientific and monitoring attention to wilderness lands.[3]

By supporting Wyoming Wilderness Association’s work to establish new wilderness in Wyoming, you will be taking an important step toward addressing the critical issue of climate change.

[1] The Wilderness Society: GLOBAL WARMING AND U.S. PUBLIC LANDS America’s Wild Lands are Under Threat, and Will Play Key Role in Any Climate Change Solution, March 4, 2008. (PDF)

[2] Ibid.