James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

Conservation and Climate Change:
The Immediate Need to Adapt

I used to think adaptation subtracted from our efforts on [climate
change] prevention. But I’ve changed my mind.

—Al Gore, quoted in the Economist, September 11, 20081

Over the past several decades, a global consensus has emerged around the need to
address climate change through mitigation, dramatically slowing the release of so-
called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so as to forestall dramatic and disrup-
tive impacts to the earth’s ecosystems. The well-known argument for climate
change related mitigation efforts generally goes like this: Unless we act in the next
decade to slow the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, our children
and grandchildren, in the not-distant future, will face awful consequences, includ-
ing rising sea levels, the spread of tropical diseases and destructive invasive species,
and epochal damage to habitats that will endanger wildlife and rare species of
plants around the globe.

Sadly, we are now seeing gathering evidence that the “not-too-distant future”
is upon us. The disruptive impacts of climate change on ecosystems and their
functions are being registered now. But the scientific and policy community has
yet to systematically address how we might adapt to the consequences of climate

James Levitt is director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard
Forest, Harvard University and a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic
Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on his-
toric and present-day innovations in land and biodiversity conservation. He is the
author of From Walden to Wall Street (Island Press/Lincoln Institute 2005), and has
lectured widely on conservation finance innovation.

Charles C. Chester is the author of Conservation Across Borders: Biodiversity in an
Interdependent World (Island Press 2006). He teaches the courses International
Environmental Conflict and Collaboration at Brandeis University and International
Biodiversity Conservation at The Fletcher School of Tufts University. He has worked
for the Henry P. Kendall Foundation on a range of domestic and international conser-
vation issues, for the Union of Concerned Scientists on global biodiversity issues, and
for the World Foundation for Environment and Development on bioprospecting.

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James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

change. A substantial effort needs to be taken immediately to design and imple-
ment strategies for adaptation to climate change.

Why have only limited efforts to grapple with adaptation to climate change
been made to date? Up until recently, the conservation and environmental com-
munities have largely seen the design of adaptation strategies as detracting from
local, regional, and global mitigation efforts. In his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance,
Al Gore argued, “Believing that we can adapt to just about anything is ultimately a
kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skin.”2
Pursuing adaptation, in other words, was seen as giving up the chase to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet despite some individual successes in mitigating the emission of greenhouse
gases, we have hardly turned the corner on emission reductions. Rather, the
growth in the level of emissions of such gases in the first half-decade of the twen-
ty-first century more than doubled the growth level recorded in the 1990s, in part
because of accelerating industrialization in developing nations such as China and
India.3

DISRUPTIVE IMPACTS: FROM THE SUBTLE TO THE HIGHLY DRAMATIC

The disruptive impacts related to climate change on environment that are now
being recorded range from the subtle and incremental changes to the highly dra-
matic transformation of entire landscapes. A casual observer of the impact of cli-
mate change in North America4 might need a field biologist to explain the creep-
ing influence of recent rises in sea level of just a few centimeters in estuaries on
coastlines on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts. In places such as the Chesapeake
Bay and along the outer coasts of coastal Virginia and North Carolina, slightly
higher elevation sections of protected sanctuaries that had harbored fresh and
brackish water fish and vegetation are now, with rising sea levels, being flooded
with salt water.5

As a consequence of these subtle changes, wholesale ecological transformation
is underway. Valuable habitat is being lost not only for the fresh and brackish
ecosystem fish, shellfish, and native coastal grasses, but also for the remarkable
migratory waterfowl that have depended on these fish for dinner during their epic
migrations. While these ongoing changes may not be apparent today to the
untrained eye, the forecast is that many millions of hectares of these coastal lands
may become entirely submerged in decades to come.

Other climate change related impacts to terrestrial ecosystems in the early
twenty-first century are much less difficult to discern, even to the casual observer.
Consider the vast expansion of the range of pine beetles in western North America
that is being facilitated by climate change, and the immense impact those beetles
may soon have across the face of the continent.

Imagine a map of North America as the face of a clock, with an hour hand
sweeping across the face that is unveiling a biological disruption of continental
proportions. The clock’s hour hand, as you may have guessed, pivots around a cen-

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Conservation and Climate Change: The Immediate Need to Adapt

tral point somewhere in Kansas. It has already swept from about nine o’clock (that
is, the pine forests in Colorado and Utah) to about eleven o’clock—which is to say
the Canadian province of Alberta. That sweep of the hour hand, from Colorado
and Utah to British Columbia and into Alberta, indicates the territory where the
pine beetle has already decimated immense lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests.6
You can color the area under the sweep of the hour hand red, not because of beau-
tiful fall colors in the trees, but because that is the color of dead needles on dead
and dying pines.

In British Columbia (BC) alone, the infestation has killed some 14 million to
15 million hectares of forest. The Alberta Minister of Sustainable Resource
Development, Andrew Morton, who is himself trying to grapple with the chal-
lenge, estimates that“there are some areas in BC [where] you won’t see a green for-
est again until 2050.”7 Andrew Nikiforuk, writing in Canadian Geographic, charac-
terizes the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), as “the author of the
worst insect infestation in North American history.”8

The beetle has been enabled in its northward march by the rising winter tem-
peratures associated with climate change. Warmer winter temperatures in high
elevations allow it to reproduce in places where it had previously been frozen out.
Because of rising winter temperatures, the vanguard of the beetle infestation has
already crossed the formerly impenetrable barrier of the Rocky Mountains and is
now well to the east of the continental divide. The vast expanse of the boreal for-
est, which stretches all the way to the Atlantic coastline in Labrador (from about
11 o’clock to 2 o’clock on our metaphorical clock) is at risk. A domino effect could
be in store for the pine forests of the northeast United States (about 1 o’clock to 2
o’clock), followed by the diverse pine forests of the southeast (about 2 o’clock to 5
o’clock). The rotation may even extend to the 6 o’clock mark in east Texas and
Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental. At that point the North American circuit of the
mountain pine beetle may be complete, for the simple reason that the continent’s
expansive pine forests do not extend across the southern reaches of the Great
Plains.

The continent-circling spread of pine beetles constitutes but one grim scenario
in a growing catalog of currently unfolding environmental disruptions associated
with climate change. Indeed, the scientific literature is now rife with evidence of
how wildlife is responding (or, sometimes worse, not responding) to climate
change.9

THE EMERGENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AS A
CONSERVATION PRIORITY

With biodiversity already beset by threats ranging from habitat destruction to
invasive species, how should conservationists respond to the challenge of climate
change? The good news is that the conservation community is generally well
informed about the real and potential impacts that climate change may have on
species around the world. Most of the largest national and international conser-

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James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

vation organizations with a significant presence in the United States have already
incorporated programs focused on climate change into their strategic plans, not to
mention their educational and membership campaigns.

Yet these groups are still striving to decide where they should concentrate their
climate change related efforts. As noted above, many already focus advocacy efforts
on promoting mitigation to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Such
advocacy efforts include initiatives to advance international agreements, such as
as-yet unsuccessful efforts to have the United States adopt the Kyoto Protocol or its
emerging successors; programs to implement regional schemes, such as the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “Reggie”) in the north-
east United States; and a wide array of local initiatives sponsored by cities, villages,
schools, and churches to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint. But as the spread
of the mountain pine beetle and the widespread transformation of coastal estuar-
ies illustrate, under even the most hopeful of mitigation scenarios, disruptive
changes to the environment have and will continue to occur, most probably at an
accelerating rate. Only in the past several years have major conservation organiza-
tions begun to deal with the immediate need to design and implement adaptation
strategies.

In February 2007, for instance, a panel of eminent scientists, in preparation for
a meeting of the United Nations’ Commission on Sustainable Development, pro-
duced a report entitled “Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the
Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable.” In the report, the lead authors,
Rosina Bierbaum (Dean of the School of Natural Resources at the University of
Michigan) and Peter Raven (Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden) highlight
the inevitability of continued climate change. In the report’s introduction, they
make an unequivocal argument for pursuing both mitigation and adaptation
strategies: “Because the climate will therefore be changing for many more decades,
it is vital that adaptation strategies are adopted in parallel with aggressive mitiga-
tion strategies.”10

Since that time, a growing body of work has helped to move forward the con-
servation community’s grasp of the immediate need for adaptation strategies. For
instance, at a workshop on the topic of Conservation and Climate Change held at
the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts in May 2007, a
small group of senior executives and subject experts working in conservation
organizations from the public, private, non-profit and academic/research sectors
gathered to consider how to develop effective adaptive management strategies. At
the conclusion of that meeting, the group decided that the issue was of such sig-
nificance that it merited a second gathering in Washington, D.C. to frame the chal-
lenge of adaptive management for a larger audience of policy-makers, conserva-
tion leaders and their staff members.

The second meeting, attended by some 100 invited participants, was held in
May 2008 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington,
D.C.11 Participants were charged with considering the following question: How can
the land and biodiversity conservation community effectively devise and imple-

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Conservation and Climate Change: The Immediate Need to Adapt

ment effective adaptive management strategies to address the ongoing impacts of
climate change on conservation land and water resources, as well as agriculture
and rural communities? In thinking through this challenge, the participants
focused on a four-tiered approach to adaptive management that includes: (1) sci-
entific observation, (2) planning and projection, (3) action in the field, and (4)
periodic assessment. In addition, the participants considered ways in which the use
of new markets, such as cap-and-trade markets to reduce greenhouse gas emis-
sions, and ecosystem service markets that reward sustainable forestry practices,
might facilitate the rapid implementation of effective adaptation strategies.

SCIENTIFIC AND MANAGEMENT RESOURCES CAN BE MOBILIZED

Participants in the May 200812 meeting learned that there are significant scientific
and management resources in the public, private, and non-profit sectors that can
be mobilized in the effort to adapt to climate change in the United States, should
we as a nation prove to have the will to do so.

Scientific observations of the impact of climate change are already well under-
way, and could accelerate markedly in pace in the next several years. Such observa-
tions range from careful field studies of individual species to satellite scans of
entire regions. Biologist Richard Primack has showed how inventive use of obser-
vations recorded by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s give us a baseline for
understanding the changes in flowering times of common plants over the past 150
years.13 Continued observations of this nature could well engage citizen scientists
across the continent.

Complementing such close-up study are continental-scale overviews of the
threatened productivity of agricultural lands in the face of climate change induced
temperature rises and an increase in severe storm events, as detailed by Tony
Janetos14 of the Joint Global Change Research Institute and Craig Cox of the Soil
and Water Conservation Society.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), with the support of
the National Science Foundation, is now laying plans to build a continental mon-
itoring network that offer us the opportunity to track changes in ecosystem func-
tion at an unprecedented scale, scope, and level of detail in years to come. As
described by the new organization’s CEO, David Schimel, data generated by the
network will offer an unprecedented overview of ecosystem function on a conti-
nental scale. When data generated by NEON is used in concert with the insights
of ecosystem scientists such as Camille Parmesan, we are likely to have an increas-
ingly “globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural sys-
tems.”15

How will we use those detailed observations? A growing number of scientists
and field conservationists hope to use it to craft resource management plans that
are robust under a range of possible scenarios. Jesse Logan, the insect specialist
who has been instrumental in helping to bring the threat of pine beetles to public
attention,16 has recently used computer modeling to find locations that may still

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James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

offer cold enough winter temperatures to avoid pine beetle infestation. Such loca-
tions may be some of the most important places to conserve in the Rocky
Mountain West.

In a similar vein, scientists at The Nature Conservancy are studying which
coastal upland areas offer the best conservation opportunities in the face of rising
sea levels along the Atlantic Coast in the United States. More recently, Botkin and
his colleagues17 have explored how to forecast broader biodiversity trends in light
of climate change, and have offered the hopeful suggestion that “there is now much
scope for an integrated framework for forecasting the impacts of global change on
biodiversity.”18

With careful planning in hand, conservationists have begun to implement sev-
eral projects that are taking direct action in the field to adapt to the impacts of cli-
mate change. These range from The Nature Conservancy’s work to protect areas
such as North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula, where TNC is eliminating old agri-
cultural drainage ditches to reduce sea water infiltration into peat marshes,19 to
large landscape conservation initiatives such as the “Yellowstone to Yukon
Conservation Initiative,” which is attempting to protect a network of “core” pro-
tected areas and wildlife corridors for a region that stretches across nearly half of
North America.20 Dr. Lara Hansen, President of the newly-created firm EcoAdapt,
is developing methods to train conservation land managers from around the world
to experiment with and assess a variety of on-the-ground adaptation strategies
that, for example, minimize human-animal interactions that are potentially dan-
gerous to both people and wildlife at such varied sites as tiger sanctuaries on
islands off the coast of India, coral atolls in the Pacific, and polar bear habitat in
the Arctic.21

The implementation of even the most carefully crafted plans, of course, is
never entirely sufficient. Ongoing assessment must be performed to ensure that
well-intended field efforts have the desired effect. Unfortunately, often due to a
lack of funding, a substantial amount of conservation work in North America suf-
fers from a lack of ongoing independent assessment, or even frank internal
review.22

There are notable and important exceptions to this state of affairs.

In the
Montana’s Blackfoot River Valley, an initiative known as the Blackfoot Challenge
has distinguished itself for efforts to reduce unwanted interactions between
humans and the local grizzly bear population, which has in recent years been
attracted to lower elevations in the valley because of the declining supply of food
supplied by high mountain pines, which are being attacked by the pine beetle. The
Blackfoot Challenge is known for crossing institutional boundaries to solve on-
the-ground problems. Its participants include public agencies such as the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks;
non-profit collaborators such as Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy; a
broad coalition of private ranchers in the valley; and management insight provid-
ed by faculty from research and academic centers at the University of Montana and
other universities. By using a multifaceted approach involving the removal of cat-

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Conservation and Climate Change: The Immediate Need to Adapt

tle carcasses from area ranches, the lock-down of area dumpsters, and an extensive
public education campaign, all of which are refined each year based on the previ-
ous year’s results, reported human-bear interactions have been reduced by more
than 90 percent since the early years of this decade.23 This and other conservation
efforts in the Blackfoot Valley, refined through extensive community consultation
each year, earned the Blackfoot Challenge an Innovations in American
Government Award from the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and
Innovation of the Harvard Kennedy School in 2006.24

In addition to essential face-to-face reassessments, adaptation efforts can also
benefit from the use of satellite imagery to audit their impact. As has been noted
in a previous edition of Innovations, the use of such technology can assist man-
agers in keeping track of changes across wide swaths of forests, such as the 762,000
acre (about 308,000 hectare) Pingree Forest in Maine, which is being managed
under a Forest Stewardship Council compliant monitoring scheme that provides
annual check-ups and in-depth assessments at each five year interval.25

HOW MARKETS CAN HELP

In the coming years, we must—and we can—ensure that efforts to adapt to the
impacts of climate change in North America are well thought out and are targeted
at protecting both the public good and our green infrastructure. As an increasing-
ly popular adage in the conservation community now goes, however,
“Conservation without money is just conversation.”

Fortunately, as is detailed in the growing body of literature on conservation
finance, the inventive use of cap-and-trade markets and of similar markets such as
wetlands mitigation markets, wildlife conservation banks, and nutrient-farming
markets, can provide financial incentives and sorely needed capital for public, pri-
vate, and non-profit organizations that provide conservation management servic-
es. 26

To cite just one example, the Lieberman-Warner legislation considered by
Congress in the late spring of 2008 came as close as any legislative effort in the U.S.
Congress to date to create a cap-and-trade mechanism for limiting fossil fuel emis-
sions into the atmosphere. The legislation included a provision that would have
channeled substantial amounts of money from the proceeds of public credit auc-
tions to adaptation efforts undertaken by the federal and state governments.27
While the legislation did not pass during this session of Congress, the prospects for
similar initiatives in the next several years are promising.

CONCLUSION

Although climate change will likely alter how conservationists strategize over
implementing habitat conservation, it in no way diminishes the overall need for
land conservation. But which land and water environments should we spend the
time, effort, and capital to save, given that some lands are already being submerged,

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James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

and some lands are already experiencing severe drought, and some lands are
already the target of voracious invasive species? Approaches to land and biodiver-
sity conservation that appeared relatively straightforward and sensible in the con-
text of a fairly stable climate generally now need re-examination. The conservation
community needs to adopt strategies that will be robust over time, even as dynam-
ic and sometimes wrenching change occurs.

Will moving the policy apparatus toward comprehensive action on observing,
planning, acting, and monitoring adaptation to climate change be either easy or
straightforward? Undoubtedly not. Has momentum begun to build toward a cli-
mate policy that recognizes the need to adapt the practice of conservation? It has
indeed. Can the U.S. maintain its national priority on reducing greenhouse gas
emissions at the same time that it implements realistic and effective adaptation
policies? That is a tall order. Yet if the precedents set by Teddy Roosevelt in helping
to save American forests in the 1900s, by Hugh Hammond Bennett in responding
to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, or by Rachel Carson in sounding the alarm for envi-
ronmental protection in the 1960s and 1970s are any indication, the task is well
within the capacity of the American people—and much preferable to the dismal
alternatives.

References

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BioScience 57, (3) 227-237.

Backlund P, AC Janetos, D Schimel. (2008). “The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land
Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity.” Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and
Assessment Product 4.3, Joint Global Change Research Institute.

Chester, Charles C. (2006). “Landscape Vision and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation
Initiative.” In Chester, Charles C., Conservation Across Borders: Biodiversity in an Interdependent
World (134-216). Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Clark, Story. (2006). A Field Guide to Conservation Finance. Washington, D.C.: Island Press

“Climate Change and the Poor: Adapt or Die.” (2008, September 11) The Economist, print edition,
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Emery, James. (2008, August 6). “Mountain Pine Beetle Continues Advance.” Cochrane Times.

Retrieved http://cgi.bowesonline.com/pedro.php?id=45&x=story&xid=413789

Gore, Albert. (1992). Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

William Ginn, (2005). Investing in Nature, Washington, D.C. Island Press.

Hansen, Lara J. (2007). Testimony of Dr. Lara J. Hansen, Chief Scientist, Climate Change Program,
World Wildlife Fund before the Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee,
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“Increase in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Accelerating.” (2006, November 27). Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organizatin (CSIRO, Australia). Media Release, Retrieved
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Kosytack, John. (2008, January 29). “Hundreds of Scientists Call on Congress to Help Wildlife

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Levitt, James. (2005). From Walden to Wall Street. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Levitt, James. (2006). “Conservation via Satellite: Leveraging Remote Sensing to Monitor the Pingree

Easement.” Innovations 1, (2) 45-67.

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Change Impacts across Natural Dystems.” Nature, 421, 37-42.

Powell, James A. and Jesse A. Logan (2005) “Insect Seasonality: Circle Map Analysis of Temperature-

Driven Life Cycles.” Theoretical Population Biology 67, (3) 161-179.

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Endnotes

1. Climate Change and the Poor (2008).
2. Gore (1992, p. 240).

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James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester

3. “Increase in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Accelerating” (2006).
4. This article focuses on the impacts of climate change on North American ecosystems (primarily
in the United States and Canada). The impacts of climate change in many places in the develop-
ing world, such as Bangladesh and Indonesia, also pose dramatic challenges to human societies
and ecosystems. For more on that topic, see The Economist, September 9, 2008, also cited. See also,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group
II, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, available at http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-
wg2.htm .

5. “Sea Level Rise and Coastal Habitats of the Chesapeake Bay: A Summary” (2008).
6. Logan, Régnière, and Powell (2003, 130).
7. Emery (2008).
8. Nikiforuk (2007, pp. 68-76).
9. For a review of 866 of such articles, see Parmesan (2006, pp. 637-669).
10. SEG (2007, p. 82).
11. Levitt and Chester (2008).
12. For further information on discussions at the conference, Levitt and Chester (2008). For further
reference on these and related topics, see the Conservation and Climate Change Clearinghouse,
hosted by the Kendall Foundation at http://www.kendall.org/clearinghouse/.

13. Nijhaus (2007).
14. Backlund, Janetos, and Schimel (2008).
15. Parmesan and Yohe (2003, pp. 37-42).
16. See Logan and Powell (2001, pp. 160-172). See also Powell and Logan (2005, pp. 161-179).
17. Botkin et al. (2007, 10).
18. Two other notable forecasts on the effects of climate change on biodiversity are: Neilson et al

(2005) and Thomas et al (2004).

19. “Save of the Week” (2007)
20. Y2YCI (2007).
21. Hansen (2007).
22. Chester (2006).
23. Wilson (2006).
24. See press releases and videos regarding the Blackfoot Challenge’s Innovations in American

Government Award at http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/pfw/r6pfw18.htm.

25. Levitt (2006).
26. Levitt (2005). See also Clark (2006) and Ginn (2005).
27. Kosytack (2008).

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