SPONSORS

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

As said by Paul Souza, Field Supervisor of U.S. Fish and Wildlife's South Florida Ecological Services:

"Climate change represents the transformational conservation challenge of our time. We must rethink the way we develop and deliver conservation strategies to meet the challenges in our future.

Our historical conservation strategies have primarily focused on two approaches: (1) protecting and managing places that provide conservation value today such as National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges, and (2) restoring areas that have been degraded over time to provide the functions they offered in years past.

In a world of climate change, these strategies are not enough. We now must have the vision to foresee an environmental baseline of the future that anticipates how climate change will affect the landscape and species that rely upon it. We must also ensure that the conservation decisions we make today will stand the test of time in a future transformed by climate change.

This partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and MIT is focused on envisioning this future baseline in the Everglades, one of the most biologically rich and important ecosystems in the world. Specifically, this partnership will build an environmental baseline of the future by focusing on three drivers: (1) potential impacts from climate change; (2) potential impacts from future development; and (3) potential benefits from Everglades restoration, one of the most ambitious and important restoration projects ever conceived.

To complete this partnership, we are working with many stakeholders -- with an emphasis on National Wildlife Refuges and imperiled species and habitats in the first phase -- to outline a series of "alternative futures" that carefully analyze how the challenges of climate change and benefits of restoration will affect our Everglades. Through this effort, we will identify species and habitats that are particularly vulnerable to the changes ahead, and also understand how restoration can help these species and habitats build resilience and adapt to the conditions in our future. We will focus on providing user-friendly tools that people can use to develop effective policies for conserving species and their habitats in a climate change world.

This partnership is an important first step in understanding how climate change will transform our future. More importantly, the partnership will help us begin to develop the new strategies we need to meet the challenge of climate change."






Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies






U.S. Geological Survey