Enhance Rural Prosperity and Manage for Resilience | USDA
Well, it's been a dismal day in D.C., and the Net is full of criticism for Obama and Harry Reid over the rewritten climate/energy bill. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has had a terrible week as well, what with the Shirley Sherrod debacle.
That said, recent publications from the US Department of Agriculture include some impressive pieces.
Take these five pillars, supporting objective #1 ("Enhance Rural Prosperity"), of goal #1 ("Assist Rural Communities to Create Prosperity so They Are Self-Sustaining, Repopulating, and Economically Thriving"), of the 2010-2015 Strategic Plan (pdf):
• Increase Access to Broadband
• Facilitate Sustainable Renewable Energy Development
• Develop and Support Regional Food Systems
• Capitalize on Opportunities Presented by the Nation’s Efforts to Develop Markets for Ecosystem Services and Mitigate Climate Change
• Generate and Retain Green Jobs and Economic Benefits Through Natural Resource and Recreation Programs
A strong list of objectives - though of course there will be little progress on developing markets for ecosystem services without the enabling carbon legislation.
From Noelle Straub's Greenwire article in the NYT on the USDA Forest Service's national roadmap for addressing climate change ("Forest Service Shifts Strategy to Address Changing Climate"):
The Forest Service has issued a national road map for responding to climate change, along with a performance scorecard to measure how well each individual forest implements the strategy.
The new blueprint outlines a series of short-term initiatives and longer-term projects for field units to address climate impacts on the country's forests and grasslands.
From the "National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change":
In responding to climate change, the Forest Service will take three types of actions:
• Assessing current risks, vulnerabilities, policies, and gaps in knowledge.
• Engaging internal and external partners in seeking solutions.
• Managing for resilience, in ecosystems as well as in human communities, through adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable consumption strategies.
And examples of performance measures from the "Performance Scorecard for Implementing the Forest Service Climate Change Strategy":
Is monitoring being conducted to track changing conditions of species, watershed condition, forest and grassland health, and other measures, and the effectiveness of treatment programs?
Does the unit have a baseline assessment of carbon stocks and flows? Does it have a strategy for integrating carbon and sustainable consumption goals with those of other ecosystem services being provided by the unit?
Getting adaptive management right
Certainly it is encouraging to see the language and perspectives of resilience make it into USDA/USFS policy documents. I would be even more encouraged if these agencies would take a critical look at how well the "beta version" of resilience, adaptive management, has been implemented in agency practice. I think there are some lessons to be learned there - and need to be learned for an implementation of resilience management to be successful. "Adaptive management strategies" are mentioned in the climate roadmap in the quote below, but they don't seem to reflect a very good understanding of the meaning of adaptive management as a process rather than a particular goal.
Quote from the National Roadmap:
Adaptive management strategies include the following:
1. Building resistance to climate-related stressors such as drought, wildfire, insects, and disease.
2. Increasing ecosystem resilience by minimizing the severity of climate change impacts, reducing the vulnerability and/or increasing the adaptive capacity of ecosystem elements.
3. Facilitating large-scale ecological transitions in response to changing environmental conditions.
Excellent. Thanks, Greg.