Wrangell - St Elias National Park & Preserve98쪽 중 31쪽
Eight Steps to Mainstream Climate Change in a Park, Tried at Wrangell-St. Elias
Climate change is the largest and most persistent threat to national parks, the authors write, and it calls for managing for continuous change. In Alaska parks, warming is already thawing permafrost, shrinking the sea ice that shields shorelines from winter storms, shifting wildlife, and driving glacial retreat that ripples through rivers, salmon and geologic hazards. Their answer is mainstreaming: building climate change into a park's everyday operations and decisions instead of treating it as a separate project. Authors from the National Park Service (NPS) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) set out eight steps, which they illustrate with the Resource Stewardship Strategy of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, where staff named climate change a foremost concern early in the planning.
Two glaciers merging in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (NPS photo).
The eight steps
The steps fall under the four cornerstones of the NPS Climate Change Response Strategy Update: understand, adapt, mitigate and communicate. The authors add partnering, and learning from the results, and say parks should act on whichever step is timely, since each deepens understanding of the others.
| Step | What it asks of a park | What Wrangell-St. Elias did |
|---|---|---|
| Read past trends from weather stations and gridded data sets, and choose two to four plausible futures | Considered twenty projections, two emission scenarios from each of ten global climate models, all treated as equally likely, and chose three as its climate futures |
| A vulnerability assessment of each target's exposure, its sensitivity and, for living things, its adaptive capacity | A qualitative assessment of each of more than 50 resource components, from glaciers and caribou to archeological sites and wilderness solitude |
| Climate literacy training, since every employee has a role | Staff from more than 15 resource disciplines and five organizational units took part in the planning |
| Decide whether, when and how to act | Is seeking a structural risk assessment of historic structures at the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, where snow loads caused major roof collapses in late winter 2021 and 2022, and has funding for research on how Copper River flows, projected to rise 48% by the end of the century, may affect sockeye salmon |
| Add forward-looking goals and several scenarios to existing planning, not a separate effort | Wrote goals and actions for each scenario, such as a subsistence goal and a step to review moose monitoring methods |
| A sustainability program; the Green Parks Plan sets ten broad goals | In 2022 replaced propane power at Kennecott with solar panels and a backup propane generator, which could cut emissions from park operations there by approximately 85%, and is replacing gasoline utility vehicles with electric ones |
| Use the park to show climate change; NPS reaches 800 million in-person and digital visitors a year | Produced a Kennicott Glacier interpretive plan in 2020 and is updating glacier panels at the Copper Center Visitor Center Complex |
| Share the work; no single park can answer climate change alone | More than 55 partners, from the Ahtna Intertribal Resource Commission to Prince William Sound Science Center, joined the scenario-based adaptation planning |
Three futures for one park
Scenario planning asks one question, what might happen, and NPS has used it since 2007. It explores several plausible conditions, weighs their implications and builds a portfolio of strategies. It does not remove uncertainty, but it brackets it, and the authors note that many parks have seen imagined worst-case scenarios overtaken by real events.
Annual mean temperature and total precipitation at Wrangell-St. Elias, 1925-2020, with 10-year running averages and trend lines (chart from the Park Service's article).
Wrangell-St. Elias picked three futures from its twenty projections, using the climate features that matter most to its priority resources. For glacial rivers the implications were similar in direction under each future and differed in size. Mid-century results, compared with 1950-1999, for those rivers and for archeological sites near rivers:
| Scenario 1: warm, wet summers, more snow | Scenario 2: dry summers and falls, early snowmelt | Scenario 3: hot summer, mild winter, rainy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glacial rivers | More runoff (14%), more fall floods, less river ice and less ice-based access, less bank stability | More (6%) and earlier runoff, lower and earlier base flows, a longer ice-free season, less bank stability | More runoff (30%), more fall floods, earlier base flows, no river ice, more bank erosion |
| Riverine archeological sites | Degraded or destroyed by more flooding | Degraded or destroyed by landslides after wildfires and by flood erosion | Severely degraded or destroyed by erosion from floods and wildfires |
For some targets the uncertainty swamped the differences between scenarios. For sockeye salmon, rearing conditions are expected to improve under every scenario while population variability grows, and the park is reviewing such uncertainties to set research and monitoring priorities. The authors add that relatively few parks have vulnerability assessments aimed at their major management decisions.
Projected changes in annual temperature and precipitation at Wrangell-St. Elias for each of the twenty projections, 2025-2055 compared with 1950-1999; the three chosen as climate futures are marked (chart from the Park Service's article).
Resist, accept or direct
For Step 4 the authors point to the Resist-Accept-Direct framework, which offers only three options when an ecosystem faces rapid, irreversible change. Resist the trajectory by working to maintain or restore historical or acceptable current conditions. Accept it by letting the system change on its own. Direct it by actively shaping it toward preferred new conditions. For most natural resources, they note, holding historical or current conditions will grow ever costlier and may become impossible.
The framework also fits cultural resources and buildings. Strategies range from limiting exposure of heritage resources where they stand, or making them less sensitive, to removing them from their setting and accepting diminished integrity, or acknowledging imminent destruction while limiting data loss and preserving the stories the resources told. For wildlife, published adaptation menus suggest actions such as maintaining genetic diversity, helping species shift their ranges, or adjusting harvest rules.
Learning as you go
The authors urge parks to design an evaluation when they take an action. If a park resists a change, for example, it should say in advance what would trigger a rethink: unreasonable costs, or an outcome such as no natural regeneration after restoration. Wrangell-St. Elias is putting this into practice with partners at the Prince William Sound Science Center, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the Native Village of Eyak and the Ahtna Intertribal Resource Commission. Two projects test how body condition and rising river flows from warming and glacial melt affect the spawning migration of Copper River sockeye. They were prompted partly by Ahtna knowledge of long-term changes in sockeye and Chinook salmon runs and by record-low sockeye runs in 2018 and 2020, which raised food security concerns for rural residents who depend on salmon.
The authors close by saying that awareness of climate change can overwhelm individuals and organizations, and that these actions are meant to guide stewardship in an era of uncertainty. Everyone has a role, they say, especially leaders who can prioritize climate topics, encourage action and promote inclusivity.
Sources
- Joel H. Reynolds, Mark E. Miller, Amber Runyon, Gregor W. Schuurman, Jeremy Littell (U.S. Geological Survey), Pamela J. Sousanes, Tom Olliff, Larry Perez, Wylie Carr, David Lawrence and Jeneva Wright (National Park Service), Planning for future climates at Wrangell-St. Elias: Mainstreaming park-based actions, Alaska Park Science, National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.