Pre-Summit Input: The National Leadership Summits for a Sustainable America

Natural Resources and Climate Change
Questionnaire

Question 1: It is December 2008. The President-elect has asked you to recommend 2-3 key Federal actions that would help conserve and manage America’s natural resources sustainably, while contributing to climate adaptation and stabilization. What actions would you recommend in any or all of these areas?

A. Forests and Agricultural Land.

Require land management agencies to develop 100-year plans at the operational level (e.g. a national forest) that consider the effects of climate change. For forests that may take 100 to 400 years to mature, and climate expected to change radically during that period, this long planning timeline is critical.
Encourage the establishment of drought and heat tolerant forest stands and communities through selective harvesting, thinning, and planting of multiple species and provenances, rather than planting pure stands of the one species that has been best adapted to conditions during the past century. Encourage use of limbs, stems, and other harvest residues in dispersed small biofuels plants, to replace energy from fossil fuels.
Require land management agencies to inventory greenhouse gases and sinks, and to implement action plans to reduce emissions and increase sequestration. One means to that end is to use the 1605(b) greenhouse gas registry to implement a national greenhouse gas market system that fully includes land resources.

B. Biodiversity and Wildlife Habitat (terrestrial and marine)

Climate change will continue to disrupt ecosystem structure and functions that support animal and plant populations. Management of the populations must be based on new monitoring protocols, developed to detect loss or gain of biological diversity, especially at the fringes of species ranges, and especially among threatened and endangered species. Contingency plans should be developed for reestablishment of critical species into new geographic areas as ecosystems become more unstable and their species composition and geographic distributions shift.
Need a comprehensive assessment of land management programs that may help species adapt to climate change, because of the need to provide appropriate mixes of protected habitats, and to do so as an appropriate distribution across landscapes and regions.
Conduct an all-out war on invasive species.

C. Water Resources

Encourage reduction of aerial crop irrigation which is responsible for over 80% of the water use in the western US, and requires large quantities of fossil fuels. Instead, encourage drip irrigation and planting of crops that do not require irrigation, or conversion of irrigated land to range land and other uses.
Water yields in the western U.S. cannot be significantly increased by harvesting forests. A 20% sustained reduction in forest cover will only result in a 7% increase in water yield over large areas (McNulty et al. in review). Instead, policies should focus on enhancing water use efficiency in agriculture and mining, and by urban users.
Water quality can be damaged by deposition of air pollutants to forested ecosystems, especially where the pollutants are most concentrated, such as the northeastern U.S. We should use newly developed national scale maps of critical acid load to assess areas of acid saturated forest. Subsequently, we should work with foresters to develop alternative management plans to reduce water quality impacts, while we design policies that reduce pollutant concentrations.
We should work with other federal and state governmental agencies to fully assess the extent and decline of subsurface aquifer reserves. In the next few decades, the deterioration or loss of these reserves will have a much greater impact on agricultural and residential sustainability and the economy, than will climate change.
Restore the Mississippi River and Columbia River by dam breaching.
Redefine wetlands to reverse the two Supreme Court rulings, so that protection is afforded to isolated wetlands, and all wetlands/streams.

Question 2: The President-elect believes that current Federal programs and policies contain a number of “perverse incentives” that lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and to unsustainable natural resource practices. If you agree, please identify 3-4 perverse incentives that you believe the President and/or Congress should abolish or reform.

Abolish the Federal Flood Insurance Program.
Require all Government agencies (agency by agency) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% in four years and 40% in 8 years.
Increase energy extraction fees on public lands to fair market value and implement a significant carbon tax all energy extraction on public lands/waters.
Abolish the use of environmental exemptions in FEMA disaster relief and recovery.

Question 3: While many programs have emerged from the grassroots to address climate change, they sometimes are fragmented and duplicative and they may not give adequate attention to natural resource stewardship. Please suggest areas in which you feel greater collaboration is needed among government agencies, corporations, nonprofit groups, academia and other organizations.

Fish and wildlife habitat conservation.
Land-use planning.
Carbon emission reduction.
There is a great need to harmonize greenhouse gas registries at Federal, Regional, and State levels, and with the private sector (the Chicago Climate Exchange).
Land ownership is highly fragmented among state, private and many federal agencies. Yet, the land surface must be managed as a contiguous entity. A new effort is needed to foster communication and cooperation among these different land owners and managers, to replace the current more competitive and polarized environment.
An assessment of national ground water and aquifer reserves by all involved land ownership parties is needed. The assessment results should be applied to formulating new policies to apply scientific information to regional water distribution and use. For example, the Colorado River Compact distributes a specific quantity of Colorado River water to each of the southwestern states, based on flow measures from what is now known to be the wettest years on record. There have been very few years since implementation in which the Colorado River contained as much water as the states have been allotted. Aquifer water reserves are even less well known and even more important to document as the economies of large parts of the high plains depend on the water in these aquifers, many of which are being drawn down at twice the rate at which they are being replenished.