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Updating Conservation Laws
Although warning signals have been apparent for some time, the enormity of climate change and its impact on the natural world did not receive significant attention from most U.S. policy makers until just the past few years. Thus, the federal, state and local laws governing natural resources management and conservation in the United States largely fail to account for climate change. Virtually the entire suite of conservation laws may need to be updated, with new policies designed to anticipate and respond to climate change impacts. Failure to carry out these policy changes will result in a host of avoidable societal harms, including wasted conservation investments, accelerated species extinctions, and loss of ecosystem goods and services.
A powerful example of the need to update conservation laws is the National Flood Insurance Program. This program currently relies heavily on outdated floodplain maps to determine whether and how development may proceed with federal flood insurance subsidies. Because the maps and the program rules do not take climate change and other future conditions into account, local governments and builders continue to place homes and businesses in hazardous locations along the coasts and in floodplains. Federal taxpayer dollars are therefore used to put people and property in harms way, at risk of rising sea levels, intensified storms, and more frequent floods. Conservationists must reform this program to minimize development in high-risk areas, make such areas available for habitat restoration, and use these restored habitats to buffer people and fish and wildlife from the intensified storms, floods and droughts that accompany climate change.
Conservation laws also must be reevaluated to accommodate the increased levels of active habitat management necessitated by a changing climate. Much of U.S. conservation policy is based on the assumption, oftentimes unstated, that it is possible to protect or restore ecosystems to maintain or achieve some kind of pristine or undisturbed condition, implicitly equated with a pre-Columbian condition.
This policy assumption was probably flawed even before rapid climate change got underway – the record shows, for instance, that 15th century Native Americans altered their environments in significant ways. It is particularly unjustified as climate change accelerates and ecological communities begin to disassemble and reassemble in novel forms. Conservation laws will need revision to allow natural resource managers to work toward a set of future ecological conditions that have no analog in the past. This must be done carefully, however, to avoid creating openings for habitat destruction and degradation in the name of climate change adaptation--practices that might be referred to as maladaptation. Indeed, habitat protection and restoration efforts must be expanded so that wildlife and ecosystems become more resilient in the face of climate change.
A particular challenge in updating laws and regulations will be the need to provide resource managers with the flexibility and agility required to manage in the face of uncertainty and change, while and at the same time holding them accountable for the protection of the resources. This will require the development of novel regulatory approaches, perhaps akin to the shift in some environmental policies from command-and-control regulations to outcomes or performance-based regulatory approaches. To provide a strong foundation for a healthy economy and high quality of life, U.S. policy makers should make clear that the nation's top priority objectives include conserving abundant and well-distributed populations of fish, wildlife and plants and ecosystems that provide essential goods and services, including flood protection, groundwater recharge, and healthy fish and wildlife-oriented recreation and industry.