Global warming threatens nation's public lands Federal agencies slow to address effects of climate change, GAO report asserts

The federal government needs to do a better job addressing how climate change is transforming the hundreds of millions of acres under its watch, according to a congressional investigative report to be released this week.

The 184-page Government Accountability Office report, which Sens. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz., requested in 2004, highlights the extent to which global warming already is affecting the nation's parks, forests, marine sanctuaries and monuments.

Looking at agencies ranging from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, accountability office officials gathered reports of dramatic changes across the nearly 30 percent of U.S. land that lies under federal control. Since 1850, the glaciers in Glacier National Park have declined from 150 to 26; climate-triggered coral bleaching in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is eroding the area's tourist appeal.

Non-native grasses are fast replacing native shrubs in the Mojave Desert, where the grasses also are fueling hotter and longer-lasting wildfires. Even pinyon pines hundreds of years old that have survived droughts before in the Southwest are dying off.

For the most part, the men and women overseeing these 600 million acres of land and 150,000 square miles of protected waters have little direction on how to respond to these shifts, according to the report.

The office said the Interior, Agriculture and Commerce departments have failed to give their resource managers the guidance and tools they need - computer models, temperature and precipitation data, climate projects and detailed inventories of plant and animal species - to cope with all the biological and physical effects from the warming.

It states these managers "have limited guidance about whether or how to address climate change and therefore, are uncertain about what action, if any, they should take. ... Without such guidance, their ability to address climate change and effectively manage resources is constrained."

In addition to the oceanic agency and the Forest Service, investigators for the General Accountability Office - an arm of Congress - examined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.

Interior Department spokesman Chris Paolino said he could not comment on the report because he had not read it, but he noted that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne established "a department-wide task force" on climate change this spring and is awaiting a final report from the panel next month.

Kempthorne instructed the task force, Paolino said, "to look at the potential impact of climate change on Interior Department lands and to develop procedures and policies to proactively and reactively respond to those impacts."

Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh said that although he could not comment, "our research and development folks have been working on climate change for years and years, and will be eager to look at the report."

The GAO investigators looked at four representative areas: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, Alaska's Chugach National Forest, Montana's Glacier National Park, and grasslands and shrubs managed by Interior's Bureau of Land Management in northwestern Arizona.

From those studies, investigators concluded: "Climate change has already begun to adversely affect federal resources in a variety of ways. Most experts with whom we spoke believe that these effects will continue and likely intensify over the coming decades."

Kerry now wants legislation requiring more climate change science.

"We waited a long time for this report to confirm the daunting prospect that climate change is impacting our public lands from coast to coast, and this administration is ill-equipped to respond," Kerry said.

Jamie Rappaport Clark, who was director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Clinton administration and is now executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, called the report an urgently needed call for the nation.

"Global warming is and will continue to contribute to species extinctions, flooding of coastal refuges and massive movements of wildlife populations in search of more hospitable habitat," she said. "Polar bears and other imperiled species, wildlife refuges, parks and myriad natural resources are at risk and Congress clearly needs to provide more legislative direction because the agencies have failed to do so."