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.

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