Conserving a Network of Climate-Resilient Lands

By Eric Aldrich

The Resilient and Connected Network, an ambitious GIS mapping tool developed over the past 10 years by more than 270 scientists led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gives conservationists a way to save biodiversity for the future. It is now available for land trusts, government agencies, and scientists for conservation planning throughout the contiguous lower 48 US states.

Read the full article in Winter 2021 issue of ArcUser, the Magazine for Esri Software Users

Note by Bruce Armstrong Taylor

Developing resiliency strategies to Climate Change will become an area of rapidly growing public and private interest, policy and governance demands for risk mitigation and management.

A root-cause analysis and examination of nearly every major weather catastrophe will likely reveal Climate Change if not the proximate cause, a significant contributing cause. And both the threats and costs keep mounting. Globally.

The Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 technologies of modern remote sensing, monitoring, drones, IoT data capture, AI and ML-enable analytics are just some of the both near- and long-range forecasting tools.

The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise Idaho has given its forecast for the Spring and Summer period, 2021. If you live (as I do) anywhere in the desert Southwest, the reality is grim, indeed. The systemic drought on the Southwest, very low water tables, low levels in major rivers and storage reservoirs, exacerbated by what will be a poor snowpack melt runoff from the Rockies, mean a difficult and dangerous Spring and Summer.

The summer of 2020 saw all National Parks, and public lands and most state parks shut because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There will very likely be great pressure to open parks and wilderness access in the Summer of 2021, unless a resurgent wave of Coronavirus strikes, and forces shutdowns.

What are the public and private "tools" now in place, planning for the eventuality of a harsh fire season in most of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado  and much of Texas?

Resiliency is directly related to having policies and governance already in place. Budget already allocated. Action plans already to be implemented.

As yourself what your own home's, neighborhood's, community's capacity to withstand a predictable severe weather or fire event?

How resilient are you? How can you know how resilient your city or state is?