US park workers have claimed that some plant species are disappearing due to climate change.
Washington:
Can America’s national parks remain “unscathed” forever, with their majestic scenery and wildlife unchanged? Global warming makes that impossible, says Wylie Carr, a climate change expert at the National Park Service.
According to Carr, who works on environmental protection on the agency’s climate change response team, higher temperatures are the main threat to the parks.
With the disappearance of some species and the destruction of the natural habitats of others, park service workers sometimes have no choice but to defy their mission established in a 1916 law: to preserve parks in their original state.
The Organic Law called on the National Park Service “to conserve the landscape, natural and historic objects, and wildlife therein and… leave them intact for the enjoyment of future generations.”
But the NPS is developing innovative strategies to meet the objective in the best possible way.
Carr spoke to AFP about some of these new ideas:
What is the new NPS philosophy?
“Often, because our policies focus on maintaining historical or natural conditions, our default mode is to resist change. What the ‘Resist, Accept, Direct’ (RAD) framework helps us do is recognize that we have to manage for persistence, but we also have to manage for transformation.
“And then, when it is no longer possible or viable to resist change, what do we do?
“The RAD framework helps us define other possibilities. One of them is simply accepting change. And often, that’s what we’re going to have to do. Because we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the ability to resist change.
“So when we’re driving change, we’re thinking: How would we intentionally move the system in a different direction, working with the trajectory we’re on, to maybe get to a more desirable end point?”
Examples of ‘targeted changes’?
“That’s where we might be thinking: Are there opportunities to maybe help species migration in a way that helps us maintain key species in a landscape, even if they’re not in the same place?
“Are there ways we can start bringing in species that will be better adapted to the future climate of the park, that are not invasive species? Perhaps it is a species that is native, but occurs further south.
“And then when we have a large wildfire, we are replanting tree species that will be better adapted to hotter, drier conditions.”
Does this contradict the mission to preserve?
“Everyone in the Park Service is very committed to the Organic Law. And it’s not that we want to manage differently, it’s that climate change is forcing us to make inevitable choices as strategically as possible.
“I think it’s important to keep in mind that no one wants to do things differently. We are being forced into this.
“Often we will have to accept change and make it clear that this is a management decision and approach that we are taking.
“And so we will not deny the impacts of climate change. They are transforming ecosystems. In many cases, we will just have to accept these changes.
“But let’s denounce it and say this is what we’re doing, and not act like we’re capable of continuing to resist everywhere, all the time.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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