Forest-based Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Although governments and businesses are starting to take responsibility for their emissions, we are now past the point where the warming of the Earth can be avoided. Further, the emission reductions that have been agreed so far are too modest to have any significant impact on the trend of global warming. Since we cannot prevent all climate change, we must attempt to adapt to it.

Increasing the capacity of poor forest-dependent communities to adapt to climate change must start with actions that target and reduce the vulnerabilities they currently face, allowing them to build more resilient and secure livelihoods. Given the reliance of the poor on ecosystem services for their livelihoods, a central element of this approach should be ecosystem management and restoration activities such as watershed rehabilitation, agroecology, and forest landscape restoration. In fact, protecting and enhancing the natural services that support the livelihoods of vulnerable communities has the advantage of meeting immediate development needs while contributing to longer-term capacity development that will create a basis for reducing future vulnerabilities.

Promoting this integrated approach to adaptation calls for the convergence of four distinct communities who have long been tackling the issue of vulnerability reduction through their respective activities: disaster risk reduction, climate and climate change, environmental management, and poverty reduction. Drawing from each of their portfolios of projects and lessons-learned, these communities now have the opportunity to jointly explore and strengthen synergies that promote climate change adaptation.

Adapting nature conservation to climate change will require going beyond traditional approaches, such as protected areas and reserves, and towards an adaptive management style. A precautionary approach is needed that reduces current risk, plans for the movement of ecosystems and species and keeps future management options open. Conservation strategies will also need to evolve beyond the notion that the distribution and composition of species, ecosystems and their services will remain the same indefinitely. Achieving connectivity among habitats across the landscape or seascape represents the best chance for adapting nature conservation to climate change.

Strategies for achieving connectivity in the landscape or seascape can only succeed if nature conservation is integrated with agriculture, forestry, fisheries and other economic development programmes and policies. At the community level, connectivity must meet people's needs. Resources will be needed especially for developing countries to strengthen institutional and individual capacities for managing natural resources more efficiently and equitably. Science-based organisations will need to work hand in hand with natural resource managers to fill knowledge gaps on ecosystem and species responses to climate change, ecosystems functioning and the key attributes of suitable habitats.

Introduction to Climate Change
Our Work in Climate Change
IUCN Climate Change Initiative