| Description |
Wildlife, one of the United States' most treasured natural resources, faces a dire future. Changing climate conditions will upend the natural world wild creatures inhabit. Dramatic shifts in precipitation, spreading disease, cascading ecological events, and catastrophic events such as wildfires and floods will present wildlife with challenges of a degree and frequency not seen in U.S. history. These shifts in climate will in turn bring to bear great pressure on the heralded U.S. approach to wildlife management. Ill equipped to respond to the jurisdictional fragmentation and scientific uncertainty that will predominate wildlife management in a changing climate, U.S. wildlife managers must seek out new tools to cope with the difficulties that lie ahead. Collaborative governance and adaptive management-management techniques designed to cope with fragmentation and uncertainty-have obvious appeal. While both have failed to date to deliver their theoretical appeal in practice, these failures can be readily attributed to inadequate implementation efforts. Remedying those deficiencies can greatly increase the likelihood of successful implementation. The federal land management agencies, which oversee the vast majority of wildlife habitat in the United States, are well suited to advance collaborative and adaptive experiments in wildlife habitat management. Acting as hubs to deploy collaboration and adaptation more broadly in the context of wildlife management, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service should incorporate implementation baselines to ensure the appropriate and sufficient deployment of collaborative and adaptive processes. Such efforts will not eliminate the grave risks wild animals face, but will help wildlife managers to have at least a chance of ushering the United States' other inhabitants through the storm. |
