Portland Press Herald - Maine Sunday Telegram

COLUMN Climate-change law needed to protect nation's flora and fauna
Plants and animals near the brink of extinction can only be saved by congressional action.

TARA THORNTON
August 22, 2009

LITCHFIELD - There can be no greater legacy to leave our children and grandchildren than the protection of our great outdoors and all of its parts.

But from our backyards to Maine's last remaining wild places, our natural resources are feeling the impacts of global warming.

Locally, warming temperatures will affect all of our state. Lobsters may be more susceptible to disease, and the sea will rise.

Our forests will change, and our beloved sugar maples will struggle.

And one animal in particular may disappear from our forests forever.

The Canada lynx is already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Its oversized paws make it uniquely suited to hunt in deep, fluffy snow where it finds its predominate food source, the snowshoe hare.

As global warming diminishes our snowpack, lynx may be lost.

Nationally, according to a report issued jointly by 13 federal departments and agencies in June, America's deserts are becoming hotter and drier, forests are under increased threat from wildfire, and fish and wildlife are struggling with changing habitats and seasons.

Like the lynx, our nation's wildlife, fish and plants already near the brink of extinction face some of the greatest threats.

As members of Congress debates how to tackle global warming, it is critical that they include efforts to safeguard natural resources from the effects already happening. Wildlife, fish and plants need help to adjust to a rapidly changing world.

Programs and funding are needed to rebuild wetlands and coastal marshes, nourish coral reefs, strengthen headwater forests, restore natural floodplains, and protect and connect forest and mountain corridors to serve as migratory paths for wildlife.

The types of projects that safeguard our wildlife also benefit us too by helping protect our water supplies, reducing damage from increasingly severe natural disasters, and conserving the many other valuable services that nature provides us for free. They also create jobs.

When senators return to Washington after the recess, they will begin debating climate-change legislation. It is critical the final legislation passed include provisions that benefit our communities and natural resources, including state and national strategies to help adapt to our warming world.

Equally important is a funding mechanism - paid by global-warming pollution sources - to provide needed resources to implement these plans.

We can be thankful that the U.S. House of Representatives included policy framework for protecting natural resources when it passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but its funding levels fell short.

Now, the Senate needs to take this strong framework and support it with an adequate funding level of at least 5 percent of the potential pollution credit revenues the bill would generate.

In addition to lessening the impacts of warming too late to stop, the emissions of heat-trapping gases like CO2 must be dramatically and quickly reduced to limit the severity of the problem. Emission reduction targets in global warming legislation must be based on what the best available science indicates is needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming to humans and wildlife alike.

Global-warming legislation should contain the strongest 2020 target possible and provisions to respond to emerging climate science that may identify a need to set deeper and more accelerated emission reduction targets.

As Congress advances solutions to prevent the worst of global warming's effects from ever being realized, we must also deal with the fact that some changes are happening today.

That's why we need our senators to lead efforts to safeguard our natural resources and ensure that we continue to protect for future generations the great outdoors and its creatures that we inherited.

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