 Climate change impacts threaten to destabilize ecosystems and natural services, with rippling effects across the world’s socioeconomic and political systems. Mitigating against the causes of these changes, specifically reducing overall emissions of CO2, must be the highest priority. However, even with aggressive changes to our energy systems, we will still see significant impacts on the natural environment over the next several decades.
The Kendall Foundation’s Climate Policy Program supports the development of scientific research, conservation strategies, and public policies that address the impacts of a changing climate. This work focuses on forested landscapes across North America.
The Climate Policy Program is organized under two broad headings:
We see a compelling need to develop strategies for adapting to the forthcoming disruptions in natural, economic, and social systems that climate change portends. This issue area is inherently uncertain because knowledge about the specific nature of climate impacts is wonting. The rapid pace of change exacerbates this level of uncertainty, and places a special emphasis on monitoring systems and adaptive policy and management responses. The Foundation supports efforts to shape climate adaptation agendas, focusing on public policies and models that demonstrate adaptive strategies to address climate impacts on forested landscapes.
Forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle by capturing and storing carbon, which is a rapidly growing globally-traded commodity. Forest conversion and degradation is also a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Emergent carbon markets offer the possibility of funding mechanism to sustain, expand and manage forests to capture carbon (or prevent its release into the atmosphere). Efforts are underway to develop rigorous rules for using forests to capture carbon, recognizing them as one of the important tools that we have at our disposal to combat climate change. Grants in this area are focused on supporting advocacy for forest carbon policies, and developing the informational resources and scientific understanding that will be needed to fully utilize forests as a climate mitigation mechanism.
In addition to these two general areas of engagement, the Foundation also works to promote:
- Ecologically and socially responsible renewable energy resource development, emphasizing wood-based biofuels development.
- Strategies for clearing barriers to wind energy siting and investments.
- Land use and resource management policies that address changes in freshwater resources and forest fire events in western forests.
- Development of monitoring systems that can provide information on climate impacts on natural systems.
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