US Forest Service - Office of the Climate Change Advisor

The many benefits we receive from forests and grasslands - provisioning services such as water, wood, and wild foods; regulating services such as erosion, flood, and climate control; and cultural services such as outdoor recreation, spiritual renewal, and aesthetic enjoyment - are threatened by climate change.

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, in a message to all employees, emphasized that every program and unit in the Forest Service has a role to play in responding to climate change. In fact, the new USDA Strategic Plan for 2010-1015 sets a departmental goal to “Ensure our national forests and private working lands are conserved, restored, and made more resilient to climate change, while enhancing our water resources.”

As a measure of this goal, all National Forests are to come into compliance with a climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy. To guide the Forest Service in achieving this goal, we have developed a Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change.

The Roadmap integrates land management, outreach, and sustainable operations accounting. It focuses on three kinds of activities: assessing current risks, vulnerabilities, policies, and gaps in knowledge; engaging partners in seeking solutions and learning from as well as educating the public and employees on climate change issues; and managing for resilience, in ecosystems as well as in human communities, through adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable consumption strategies. And, to measure our progress in moving toward this goal, we have implemented a Performance Scorecard.

The scorecard includes measures of progress made by each national forest and grassland, supported by the regional offices, stations, and national programs. The scorecard will address agency capacity (training and program guidance); partnerships (alliances, integrating science and management); adaptation (assessing and monitoring key resource vulnerabilities and priorities); and mitigation (assessing and managing carbon stocks and flows, reducing our environmental footprint).

The Climate Change Resource Center (CCRC) provides information and tools to land managers to address climate change in project planning and implementation. The CCRC offers educational information, decision-support models, maps, simulations, case studies, and toolkits.

We encourage you to download a copy of the National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change as well as information about the Agency’s scorecard process.

Learn more about the Forest Service's Strategic Framework for Responding to Climate Change.