Defenders of Wildlife Highlights Impacts of Global Warming On Wildlife and Public Lands in Testimony before Energy and Mineral Resources House Subcommittee
"Energy policy, global warming and public lands are inextricably linked," stated Matson. "Current energy policy on America's public lands is doubly damaging for wildlife: the rapid and haphazard expansion of oil and gas drilling has devastated wildlife habitat, while the ultimate burning of these fossil fuels contributes to global warming pollution, which is the single greatest threat facing people and wildlife today."
In his testimony Matson offered ways the federal government can help wildlife navigate the global warming bottleneck, a 100 year period where carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will persist before the benefits from reductions in greenhouse gas emissions takes effect. Below are excerpts from his testimony:
Reform Energy policy to reduce the
impacts of oil and gas development on wildlife.
"Wildlife will have
little chance of adapting to the impacts of global warming if already stressed
by lose and fragmentation of habitat, competition with invasive species and
pollution. Thus, reducing these other problems affecting wildlife is key to
helping wildlife navigate the bottleneck of global warming impacts, and ensuring
that wildlife and wildlife habitat are resilient to these changes should be a
top priority. Unfortunately, our current energy policy does the exact opposite.
The Bush administration has treated wildlife as an impediment to the extraction
of energy and other resources from America's public lands. On National Forests,
the Bush administration eliminated the 20 year old requirement that national
forests maintain viable wildlife populations, giving the Forest Service the
green light to offer our national forests to energy companies with little
assurance that wildlife populations will be left for when these companies have
gone."
"…Wildlife protections under the Bush administration have been specifically targeted as impediments to energy development, instead of viewing wildlife conservation as the cost of doing business on public lands."
Coordinate interagency response to
help wildlife adapt to ecological changes.
"…a coordinated,
interagency response is essential. It makes no sense for each coastal wildlife
refuge or national seashore to reinvent responses to rising sea levels. Agencies
should also be required to address global warming in their program planning,
land management, and environmental analyses."
Enhance scientific capacity to
better understand the impacts of global warming on wildlife
"A
coordinated science arm of a national strategy for addressing the impacts of
global warming on wildlife will also be essential in developing and determining
the efficacy of specific measures to address those impacts. A number of
different types of responses have already been proposed by the scientific
community including the protection and restoration of habitat corridors to
assist species in shifting their ranges and the protection of climate "refugia"
– areas that are not as vulnerable to the whims of a changing climate and are
better able to preserve biodiversity through the climate bottleneck. These and
other strategies will need to be further developed and tested."
Provide funding to address global
warming's impacts on wildlife
"Development and implementation of a
national strategy to address global warming's impacts on wildlife, providing the
necessary science to underpin that strategy, and taking action to reduce other
stressors on wildlife will require substantially more money than is currently
provided to conservation. Climate Change legislation should include revenue
dedicated to programs to offset the impacts of global warming on wildlife, with
special emphasis on providing funding to address federal responsibilities for
wildlife and land conservation in the face of global warming."
Matson concludes his testimony by saying, "Global warming is the conservation challenge of our time. It casts a long shadow over all of our other efforts to conserve and recover wildlife. We must act promptly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to halt and eventually reverse the changes we are causing to our planet from global warming. At the same time, we must take steps to enable wildlife to survive the next century of inevitable impacts from global warming, to navigate this bottleneck, so that wildlife and, ultimately, humans, will benefit from the actions we take now to stop global warming."
The entire testimony can be found here.
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Defenders of Wildlife is recognized as one of the nation's most progressive advocates for wildlife and its habitat. With more than 500,000 members and supporters, Defenders of Wildlife works with federal, tribal, state, and local agencies, private organizations, and landowners to protect America's national wildlife refuges.
Contact(s):
Deborah Bagocius, (202) 772-0239
