Our guest blogger, Doug Parsons from Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, offers up some provocative questions on the topic of forest carbon credits and state wildlife action plans. Let’s get a dialogue going.

“As state wildlife agencies struggle to find match for their state wildlife grant projects, we should consider the emerging carbon markets as an additional source of match. For example, many states use State Wildlife Grant funds for projects that restore habitats, in the process, this restoration is sequestering carbon. In Florida, we are currently funding Longleaf pine restoration to restore critical Sandhill habitat. Keep in mind, that sequestered carbon has a dollar value: why can’t we count that as match for the grant?

We don’t want to get in the business of helping private or public entities generate a profit directly from a State Wildlife Program grant, but if the project is structured appropriately, those carbon credits generated through these projects can be counted as overall project funding. It would be agreed in any contract that any money generated through the sale of carbon credits, as a direct result of the grant funding, would be used to further the overall goals of that particular project, e.g., site maintenance, additional tree plantings, burning, etc. Basically, this approach reinvests any carbon money generated back into the same project. It would be valuable if the Fish and Wildlife Service allowed this match flexibility, since generating 50/50 match is always a challenge for the states, especially in lean budget times.

So two questions: 1) Does anyone know if the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service allows this? And 2) if so, are there any states currently using carbon credits, in any form, as match for their State Wildlife Program grants?”

Photo by Ryan Hagerty

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation recently launched its portal in the Conservation Registry! The portal will show the world where the Foundation is making conservation investments to protect native species and their native habitats.

Congress created the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in 1984 to help direct public conservation dollars to the most pressing environmental needs and match those dollars with private funds. The Foundation prides itself on their creative and pragmatic approach to doing conservation and they have contributed to some of the most innovative projects, ranging from teaching Whooping Cranes to fly to creating a market-based program for river restoration.

Registry portal’s give agencies and organizations a way to share what they’re doing on-the-ground with others, visualize their projects in a larger context, and tailor the Registry’s features to fit their own needs. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation needed a way to track and share their projects on a map in a very easy-to-use, publicly accessible manner and creating a portal provided them with that capability.

View the portal here. Check out the Foundation’s web site here.

The Pacific Coast Joint Venture now has a portal in the Conservation Registry. The portal is poised to become the primary tool for geospatial tracking of Pacific Coast Joint Venture partners’ accomplishments, while helping them coordinate with others to implement on-the-ground projects.

The Pacific Coast Joint Venture develops partnerships to protect and restore lowland wetland and upland ecosystems for the benefit birds and other wildlife. The joint venture works in the coastal areas of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Northern California and Hawaii. The PCJV is one of 18 habitat joint ventures in North America working to carry out the goals of four major bird conservation initiatives.

Registry portals are designed to give organizations the ability to visualize their projects in a larger context and to tailor the Registry’s features to their own needs. The Pacific Coast Joint Venture needed a portal that could integrate its information-rich web site with the portal’s mapping capabilities, while enabling partners to access, update and visualize their projects electronically.

View the portal here. Check out the Pacific Coast Joint Venture’s web site here.

Salt Creek, Death Valley, California

Registry staff will soon roll out some changes to make it easier to use the Conservation Registry to track climate change adaptation activities. The idea behind climate change adaptation is to start planning now for the unavoidable effects of climate change — the ones that we’re already committed to, despite our best efforts to reduce emissions. In fact we’re already starting to see many of these changes on the ground today, so we know it’s important to make sure the conservation work we do now will still make sense in a rapidly changing climate.

In talking about how to best track adaptation activities, we’ve had to face up to some interesting questions about climate change and conservation: What is climate change adaptation, exactly? How do we know it when we see it? How can we figure out what’s adaptive and what’s not in a world where future conditions are so uncertain? Are all conservation actions climate-adaptive? Are there actions we should take specifically to prepare for and adapt to the consequences of climate change?

We don’t have any pat answers to these questions yet… if you do, please share them in the comments! Perhaps Dr. Lara Hansen has it figured out:

“Today, everything we do, every decision we make, every plan we put into place is either planning for climate change (adaptation) or it’s done without regard for the reality of climate change (maladaptation)… Adaptation is the new lens through which we must view the world and make decisions in it, if we want them to be good, robust decisions.”

What do you think? Can climate change adaptation be found in making sure every decision we make is climate-smart? Or is there something more to it? Comment below.
–Sara O’Brien, Defenders of Wildlife