Montana' Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks convene 1st Meeting of their Climate Adaptation Working Group

The State of Montana's Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) convened its first meeting of its Climate Adaptation Working Group on October 16, 2009 in Helena Montana. There were 21 participants representing government and the NGO community. Montana's Climate Adaptation Working Group is the result of the State's effort to implement the Western Governors Association Wildlife Corridor Initiative and comes just after the State has compiled its new Crucial Areas and Connectivity Assessment, now provisionally called the Montana Decision Support System.

Some of the highlights from this first meeting include:

1. Building the architecture for a robust plan. Given the fact this is the first plan for the State, that climate predictions are still imprecise at the fine scale, and that capacity and resources to perform detailed modeling and monitoring for the entire State, all its biodiversity, and all ecoregions is limited, this group aspires to build a planning framework to insert climate data and climate impacts as information comes online and is refined. The building blocks for the plan include the the Montana Decision Support System; regional information from ongoing or planned efforts in the Crown of the Continent, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Northern Great Plains; federal efforts to assess climate impacts on public lands; statewide climate data efforts with the University of Montana, NatureServe, the Nature Conservancy and US Geologic Survey; and interstate efforts with the activities of the Western Governors Association, with NGOs that are working to connect planning efforts between states such as National Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife. The Working Group hopes to create the basic architecture of an initial plan that the State can refine as adaptation knowledge and resources come online over time (i.e., Montana Climate Adaptation Plan version 1.0).

2. Discreet tasks. The Working Group was subdivided into several smaller task teams with discreet objectives. The overall goal of the working group is to develop a plan to assess climate impacts and develop management recommendations for conserving species, habitats and ecological processes in Montana based on observed and expected impacts. As such, task groups looking at species, habitat and ecological process exposure to climate change were established (i.e., vulnerability risk assessment). Other task groups include data collection, climate modeling, outreach (to the Governor's office, to other states and to federal partners), and Working Group coordination.

For more information please contact: Amielle DeWan at adewan@defenders.org