While global warming will produce losses to both people and the environment from droughts, floods and rising sea levels, it will also create opportunities, according to the director of climate-change science for The Nature Conservancy.
While global warming will produce losses to both people and the environment from droughts, floods and rising sea levels, it will also create opportunities, according to the director of climate-change science for The Nature Conservancy.
"You hear a lot of gloom and doom when people talk about climate change," said Dominique Bachelet, "but there is lots of opportunity, too.
"We have the technology and the brainpower needed to maintain forests, plan sensible development along our seashores, protect people from floods and protect our natural resources. All we need is direction."
Bachelet, a native of France who earned a Ph.D. in botany and plant pathology at Colorado State University, has conducted research involving the simulation of climate change's effects on land-based ecosystems for much of the past 25 years. She was one of the contributing authors to the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessments and served as an expert reviewer on the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning 2007 climate-change assessment.
She and The Nature Conservancy's state director, Rodney Bartgis, were in Charleston Wednesday as part of a two-state tour to meet the news media and conservancy supporters.
According to Bachelet and Bartgis, West Virginia may be better suited than most other eastern states to protect native plant and animal species vulnerable to climate change, particularly if tracts of key habitat can be restored, preserved and connected.
"The central and southern Appalachians have more environmental variation than any other places in the East," said Bartgis.
He said West Virginia also has high mountain ridges like Allegheny Front and Cheat Mountain that run north and south, covered with relatively unbroken forest to allow species to move into habitat better suited to their needs as the climate changes.
Preserving and adding to unfragmented tracts of high-altitude forest "will help ensure that a portion of our vulnerable plants and animals will survive," he said.
Climate changes forecast for the eastern United States include warmer temperatures and less precipitation, causing many existing plant and animal species to migrate northward.
Some species now living at the southern limit of their range - like highland rush, a grassy plant more commonly associated with Greenland or Canada's Baffin Island, that also lives on several West Virginia mountaintops - will have a difficult time surviving climate change here.
"There's no upland place for it to migrate to here, so we could lose it," Bartgis said. "But with a little conservation action, many species will survive."
He said another highland species, the federally endangered Cheat Mountain salamander, has a fairly good chance of survival, if care is taken to preserve and add to the red spruce forest habitat in which it dwells.
While global warming will produce losses to both people and the environment from droughts, floods and rising sea levels, it will also create opportunities, according to the director of climate-change science for The Nature Conservancy.
"You hear a lot of gloom and doom when people talk about climate change," said Dominique Bachelet, "but there is lots of opportunity, too.
"We have the technology and the brainpower needed to maintain forests, plan sensible development along our seashores, protect people from floods and protect our natural resources. All we need is direction."
Bachelet, a native of France who earned a Ph.D. in botany and plant pathology at Colorado State University, has conducted research involving the simulation of climate change's effects on land-based ecosystems for much of the past 25 years. She was one of the contributing authors to the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessments and served as an expert reviewer on the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning 2007 climate-change assessment.
She and The Nature Conservancy's state director, Rodney Bartgis, were in Charleston Wednesday as part of a two-state tour to meet the news media and conservancy supporters.
According to Bachelet and Bartgis, West Virginia may be better suited than most other eastern states to protect native plant and animal species vulnerable to climate change, particularly if tracts of key habitat can be restored, preserved and connected.
"The central and southern Appalachians have more environmental variation than any other places in the East," said Bartgis.
He said West Virginia also has high mountain ridges like Allegheny Front and Cheat Mountain that run north and south, covered with relatively unbroken forest to allow species to move into habitat better suited to their needs as the climate changes.
Preserving and adding to unfragmented tracts of high-altitude forest "will help ensure that a portion of our vulnerable plants and animals will survive," he said.
Climate changes forecast for the eastern United States include warmer temperatures and less precipitation, causing many existing plant and animal species to migrate northward.
Some species now living at the southern limit of their range - like highland rush, a grassy plant more commonly associated with Greenland or Canada's Baffin Island, that also lives on several West Virginia mountaintops - will have a difficult time surviving climate change here.
"There's no upland place for it to migrate to here, so we could lose it," Bartgis said. "But with a little conservation action, many species will survive."
He said another highland species, the federally endangered Cheat Mountain salamander, has a fairly good chance of survival, if care is taken to preserve and add to the red spruce forest habitat in which it dwells.
The Nature Conservancy's West Virginia conservation effort will likely focus on protecting tracts of cooler, high-altitude habitat to give native species vulnerable to warm, dry conditions a better chance to survive.
Generally warmer and drier conditions over the next few generations will cause plant, animal and insect species not currently found in West Virginia to migrate into the state from the south, Bachelet said.
"A lot of people see all new species as invasive and harmful," she said. It will be a challenge, she said, to differentiate between true invasive species and migrating species that will survive in a changed climate
"Some species may go extinct, but others may do better with the climate change," said Bachelet. "Species will change, but the play will go on - maybe with different actors - if we protect the stage."
While reduced greenhouse-gas emissions would prevent some of the most catastrophic effects of global warming, climate change is already underway - and will become more evident in coming years - even if emissions were capped immediately, according to Bachelet.
The Nature Conservancy, currently the largest private landowner in the world, will focus much of its attention in coming years on reforestation, wetlands and grassland preservation and restoration, and the protection of rivers and adjacent riparian corridors, she said.
While climate-change modeling is a valuable planning tool, according to Bachelet, "it's no crystal ball."
When it comes to forecasting with precision when, where and to what degree climate changes will occur - particularly in the short term - "there's still a lot of uncertainty," she said.
But in the eastern United States, she said, it will become warmer and drier, with more forest fires initially, then fewer fires as deadfall diminishes and growth rates go down.
"It will be a new world, with new conditions," said Bachelet, "but there will still be lots of opportunities."
"At the end of the game, maybe bluebells won't be growing everywhere in West Virginia," said Bartgis, "but they will grow somewhere."
To contact staff writer Rick Steelhammer, use email or call 348-5169.
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