Climate Change Plan In The Works for Northern Rockies

Climate change trends in the Pacific Northwest already point to where snowpack levels, fish survival and wildfire frequency are headed.

But how snow, fish and wildfire might combine to affect lakeside picnicking is a work in progress. That’s why roughly 100 federal, state, tribal and private land managers packed into Missoula's Holiday Inn Parkside this week to write a climate-change vulnerability and adaptation plan.

“For a while, a lot of people thought there was too much uncertainty around climate change,” said David Peterson, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Seattle. “But we’re pretty sure about some things. With temperature, different models predict different magnitudes of increase, but they’re all predicting it will get warmer. For snowpack, we’ve got good evidence over the past 60 years that it’s declining and will continue to decline. Most of the West is arid – there’s going to be a lot of competition for that moisture.”

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