By Becky Ham
John Holdren, President Obama's top science adviser and climate change expert, puts it like this:
“The Earth has a fever.”
A majority of the world’s climate scientists agree that human activities like burning coal and gas have thrown up a blanket of pollution that has been warming our planet since 1750. The increase in the Earth’s average temperature is the most obvious sign of global climate change, but other symptoms such as shrinking glaciers, rising seas, and extreme changes in rainfall are affecting nations worldwide.
You already may be feeling the fever in your own community. Maybe your nearby forest is unraveling at its edges, shrunken by drought and fire. Or maybe it’s something as simple as missing the finches that used to migrate to your porch feeder, but no longer pay a winter visit. From wild lands to wildlife, climate change touches every backyard.
While world leaders look for ways to slow warming, The Conservation Fund is already at work in your backyard, using some of our best-tested tools to preserve your land, your water, your livelihood and your nation’s natural treasures. The threat may be global in scope, but the Fund is a local partner when it comes to meeting the challenges of climate change.
Climate change means something different to a ranch in Wyoming and a resort hotel in Florida. We know—we’ve been there, working alongside community, corporate and government partners as they look for ways to thrive in a warming world:
Sustainable Forest Management: Since 2004, we have purchased 40,000 acres of forest land in California’s North Coast region. The properties were among the first and largest to receive verification of its carbon offsets by the California Climate Action Registry. The towering redwoods store more carbon per acre than any other forest type on Earth. Sustainable forest management of this forest enables the storage of more than 77,000 tons of carbon emissions annually, which is the equivalent of taking more than 14,000 cars off the road every year.
Go Zero®: Our Go Zero program is helping to restore the woodlands of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Louisiana’s Red River National Wildlife Refuge. The replanted forests soak up carbon emissions: In the Lower Mississippi River Valley, with our partners we plant approximately 302 trees per acre, which will sequester an estimated 361 tons of carbon dioxide over 100 years.
Carbon Project Development: A market leader in carbon sequestration, we have restored 20,000 acres and planted 6 million trees that will capture an estimated 7.2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over their lifetime.
Climate change can splinter a habitat in ways that threaten the survival of species that call it home. Our acquisition of 16,000 acres of forestlands in California’s North Coast ensures that the redwood and Douglas fir forests surrounding Garcia River, Big River and Salmon Creek will be permanently protected from fragmentation and development.
The forests of the American South shelter an amazing collection of plants and animals, equal to the variety found in a tropical rainforest. In South Carolina, we have helped preserve one of these forests in the Woodbury and Hamilton Ridge Forestlands. Development and climate change are shrinking the woodlands, but the conservation area is now a safe haven for the Kentucky warbler, rusty blackbird and others.
The South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho supports the largest native Yellowstone cutthroat trout fishery outside of Yellowstone National Park, produces half the bald eagles in Idaho, and provides a habitat for imperiled species like the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse. In 2009, we assisted with land purchases in the Fork to protect hundreds of acres for these unique animals, while opening new travel corridors for elk and mule deer that have had their migration routes disrupted by warming temperatures.
Climate change and development have reduced the historic ranges of some species to a handful of isolated populations at risk of becoming locally extinct. Projects such as our Mississippi River Revolving Fund, which helps purchase land along the main stem of the river and its important tributaries, create wildlife corridors that knit together fragmented families of Mississippi plants and animals.
As global temperatures rise, birds must find new “stopover” places along their migration routes to winter and breeding grounds. At places like Texas’ Big Thicket National Preserve—the “biological crossroads of North America”—the Fund and its partners have permanently protected more than 40,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and bayou as a refuge for hundreds of waterfowl and songbirds.
Thanks to warming temperatures, grizzly bears are ranging farther north than ever before. On Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, we work with local ranchers to provide new travel corridors for the bears as they move from the mountains to the plains. In the first year of an unprecedented five-year project, the Fund and its partners protected 21,274 acres of critical migratory routes for the grizzly and other wildlife.
In 2008, we opened the Pineywoods Mitigation Bank to preserve 19,000 acres along Texas’ Neches River. Mitigation credits sold to oil and gas exploration companies through the bank will help preserve wetland areas that absorb the impact of hurricanes and seasonal floods, both of which are expected to increase in number and ferocity as global temperatures rise.
Forest fires—stronger and more frequent than in past years—are one potential impact of global climate change that will be felt at the local level. In the American South, the waxy and fire-resistant longleaf pine could insulate communities from devastating burns. We are working with America’s Longleaf Initiative to map the region’s remaining longleaf stands—and suggest ways to restore the forest across its historic range.
What to develop and what to conserve? Our Green Infrastructure program can help communities facing drought, encroaching wildlife and the loss of recreation areas brought on by climate change. In Cecil County, Maryland, we showed county officials how to build a network of natural areas to protect 94 percent of its wetlands and 75 percent of its forests. The protected areas provide clean air, water and flood control—an estimated $1.7 billion in ecosystem services each year.
Our Natural Capital Investment Fund provides capital to small and emerging natural resources businesses. In our portfolio—companies looking ahead to the future of a planet shaped by climate change:
Carolina Wood Pellets, which provides North Carolina residents with energy efficient, low-emission wood pellets to heat their homes.
FLS Energy, Inc, which provides solar thermal products and services that can help home and business owners reduce their fossil fuel consumption and shrink their emissions.
At the Fund we help save wild havens: large, natural spaces for wildlife to be exactly that—wild. Your gift ensures that wildlife, like this bear cub, has the habitat it needs to thrive.
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The "climate conversation" has its own vocabulary. Click here for definitions of frequently used terms.
We've put a list together of links to useful resources on climate change. Click here for the list.
Bright Idea: If every American replaced one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb next year, the decrease in pollution would be equal to taking nearly a million cars off the road.
Buy the iPhorest application for iPhone and grow your own virtual tree! Plant a seed, shake your iPhone to create rain and when the virtual sun shines, your tree grows—reaching a new stage every day. For every virtual tree purchased, we'll plant a real one!
MacLife highlighted iPhorest as one of the few good charitable apps for iPhone.
Join Halls® and The Conservation Fund as we preserve, restore and protect one of America's most precious natural resources, our trees.
Click here for more information.
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1655 N. Fort Myer Drive, Suite 1300
Arlington, Virginia 22209-2156
Phone: 703-525-6300
Fax: 703-525-4610
Email: postmaster@conservationfund.org
