DOI Launches Strategy for Addressing Climate Change Impacts

US Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Salazar has launched the DOI’s first-ever coordinated strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change on America’s land, water, ocean, fish, wildlife, and cultural resources. NEON, Inc. participated in some of the early planning discussions and will be contributing data that will support the DOI effort and enable scientists to forecast the effects of climate change on natural resources.

Monday, Secretary Salazar signed a secretarial order establishing a framework through which Interior bureaus will coordinate climate change and resource management strategies. A new Climate Change Response Council, led by DOI's Secretary, Deputy Secretary and Counselor, will coordinate DOI’s response to the impacts of climate change within and among the Interior bureaus and will work to improve the sharing and communication of climate change impact science.

The Secretarial Order also calls for the establishment of eight Regional Climate Change Response Centers distributed across the nation to synthesize and integrate climate change impact data and develop tools that DOI’s managers and partners can use when managing the Nation’s land, water, fish and wildlife, and cultural heritage resources. The Order also specifies additional activities for carbon sequestration via geological and biological means as part of the DOI Carbon Storage Project led by the USGS in close collaboration with the other DOI bureaus.

NEON, Inc. was one of the organizations invited to participate in discussions leading up to the establishment of the Regional Climate Change Response Centers (previously known as the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC) Regional Science Centers). In ongoing discussions with various Federal agencies, NEON, Inc. has highlighted the utility of the suite of over 600 NEON data products in contributing toward a better understanding of ecological processes, including carbon cycling, at the continental and regional scale. NEON anticipates a long-term engagement with Federal partners in assessing needs for integrated modeling, assessing information gaps, and designing strategies to close those gaps. NEON will serve as a research platform for discovering the impacts of climate change on ecology, enabling the understanding and forecasting of climate change impacts, and will provide comprehensive information on continental ecosystem changes for resource managers.