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  International Herald Tribune 2 Feb 07
The world will need our help when it gets hot
Nikita Lopoukhine

OTTAWA: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, some 2,500 scientists, issued its fourth report on Friday in Paris.

The news is that the fact of rising temperatures is no longer news; even the media has stopped trying to adopt a "balanced" approach to the few remaining skeptics, and politicians are leaping on the green bandwagon.

The debate now is how to identify the horrific effects of climate change and what to do about them. In fact, the main criticism of the IPCC report is that it minimizes effects such as rising sea levels.

Of course, the immediate need is to reduce emissions.

Some solutions have been offered for this, from the Kyoto protocols to trading in carbon futures. There is also a lot of sensible advice out there, from Al Gore and from your now-green utility company, among others, on what you can do to help.

But there has been far less discussion about how to cope with the inevitable changes, and even less about how we can help affected plants and animals.

The plight of polar bears has captured our imagination, to the point where they have become an icon of climate change.

But countless other species also need our help. Just imagine a salamander trying to move to cooler northern regions faced with crossing an autobahn.

In short, as we humans begin developing strategies for adapting to a hot new world, we must not exclude the greater global biodiversity.

Will plants and animals be capable of coping with entirely new conditions of temperature and precipitation? Should we help them?

We should, if only because biodiversity is critical to our lives. We still depend on wild stock of fish. Healthy forests store carbon that reduces the effects of our emissions and also filter pollution and yield clean water.

New York City has avoided spending millions on water-purifying technology that forests in the Catskills provide at a much cheaper price.

And is there not also a moral imperative to help, given that it is our actions that have created the problem?

I would propose three strategies to minimize the impact of climate change on biodiversity.

First, invest in parks and protected areas with an eye to climate change. We need to identify the critical habitats of the future:

Where are species likely to move in response to changes in climate? Migrating birds, for example, will follow the creation of new wetlands as patterns of precipitation change and sea levels rise.

Are these areas secure? If not, we need to create protected areas to accommodate them.

Second, invest in connectivity. Creating isolated protected areas is not enough. We have to establish connections among areas of land and sea under all kinds of use to help species respond to changing climates.

We have to identify the corridors that species will likely use and secure them. The north-south corridor of the Rocky Mountains, for example, must continue to serve goats and grizzly bears. Species which inhabit the tops of mountains and islands, such as the boobies on Darwin's famous Galapagos Islands, will have nowhere to go when temperatures increase.

Rescue operations may be the scenario of the future--physically moving plants to a higher or more northern mountain, for example, may be the only way to save species such as the edelweiss.

A third strategic investment should be in ecological restoration--a deliberate effort to reintroduce extirpated species, to build wetlands where they have been wiped out, or to reintroduce fire to ecosystems with species such a pines that depend on fire for seed dispersal or for creating openings in which poplars and birches can grow.

This is not a task only for ecologists. The forestry, fishery and agriculture industries should recognize the importance to them of assisting in the recovery of degraded, damaged or destroyed ecosystems.

There is no longer any question that the world is changing.

So as we start thinking seriously about how to stop messing it up any further, let's also start thinking about how to help all life forms adapt.

Nikita Lopoukhine, former director general of National Parks in Canada, is chairman of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.
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