Ken Salazar, secretary of the Department of Interior, signed a secretarial order yesterday to create a department-wide strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change. The Department of the Interior manages 1.7 billion acres of land, a full one-fifth of the nation’s land mass, and employs 67,000 people in scientific and resource management roles. The department oversees the management and protection of water, land, fish and wildlife, cultural heritage and tribal lands and resources.
This step to monitor and help the country adapt to global change, is the nation’s first coordinated response to climate change. The document outlines the commitment to a clean energy economy, and lays a framework of items that the department will need to better manage.
The secretarial order establishes a Climate Change Response Council that will, “increase scientific understanding of and development of effective adaptive management tools to address the impacts of climate change on our natural and cultural resources.” There will also be a number of regional Climate Change Response Centers that have begun with the U.S. Geological Survey regional hubs in collaboration with other Interior agencies, federal, state, university and non-governmental partners. The eight Response Centers will synthesize and integrate climate change impact data and will develop tools to manage resources.
The document also mentions a need to create Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, due to the broad impacts that happen at a large regional scale. The creation of cooperatives will help coordinate adaptation strategies on a regional level to such things as invasive species and the protection of endangered species.
The secretarial order not only establishes monitoring and management, it also addresses the energy impacts by coordination the DOI’s Carbon Storage Project to study geological and biological carbon sequestration. This comprehensive plan is being lauded by the Sierra Club and other conservation-oriented organizations as an important step forward in the nation’s response to climate change.
You can read the full secretarial order here.
