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Guide: Making Equity Real in Climate Adaptation and Community Resilience Policies and Programs
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A Guidebook from the Greenlining Insitute, a nonprofit founded in 1993, that works to create a nation where communities of color thrive and race
is never a barrier to economic opportunity.
To prioritize the climate adaptation and community resilience needs of frontline communities and address the historical neglect they have experienced, we must move beyond embracing equity to making it real. This requires centering community needs and building social equity into the very fabric of policies and grant programs that focus on climate adaptation and resilience. To get there, this Guidebook offers policymakers a blueprint on how to operationalize equity in policies and grant programs
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How to work with communities
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Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
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Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.
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Climate Science Documents
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Land Use and Energy Development in the Appalachian LCC
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A brief discussion of primary land uses in the AppLCC.
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AppLCC Development and Operations Planning
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Conservation Challenges in the Appalachian LCC
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Management Capacity - Federal DOI Agencies
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Management capacity that lies within Dept. of Interior agencies.
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General Resources Holdings
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AppLCC Development and Operations Planning
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Private Land Conservation Programs from the Farm Bill and Other Sources
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Join us for a discussion of current and future Farm Bill programs administered by the Forest Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service, and Farm Service Agency that support private landowner efforts to protect working forests and conserve open space.
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News & Events
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Events
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Scenarios of future land use change around United States’ protected areas
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Land use change around protected areas can diminish their conservation value, making it important to
predict future land use changes nearby. Our goal was to evaluate future land use changes around protected
areas of different types in the United States under different socioeconomic scenarios. We analyzed
econometric-based projections of future land use change to capture changes around 1260 protected
areas, including National Forests, Parks, Refuges, and Wilderness Areas, from 2001 to 2051, under different
land use policies and crop prices. Our results showed that urban expansion around protected areas
will continue to be a major threat, and expand by 67% under business-as-usual conditions.
Concomitantly, a substantial number of protected areas will lose natural vegetation in their surroundings.
National land-use policies or changes in crop prices are not likely to affect the overall pattern of land use,
but can have effects in certain regions. Discouraging urbanization through zoning, for example, can
reduce future urban pressures around National Forests and Refuges in the East, while the implementation
of an afforestation policy can increase the amount of natural vegetation around some Refuges throughout
the U.S. On the other hand, increases in crop prices can increase crop/pasture cover around some protected
areas, and limit the potential recovery of natural vegetation. Overall, our results highlight that future
land-use change around protected areas is likely to be substantial but variable among regions and
protected area types. Safeguarding the conservation value of protected areas may require serious consideration of threats and opportunities arising from future land use.
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Climate Science Documents
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Stakeholder participation for environmental management: A literature review
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The complex and dynamic nature of environmental problems requires flexible and trans- parent decision-making that embraces a diversity of knowledges and values. For this rea- son, stakeholder participation in environmental decision-making has been increasingly sought and embedded into national and international policy. Although many benefits have been claimed for participation, disillusionment has grown amongst practitioners and stakeholders who have felt let down when these claims are not realised. This review first traces the development of participatory approaches in different disciplinary and geograph- ical contexts, and reviews typologies that can be used to categorise and select participatory methods. It then reviews evidence for normative and pragmatic benefits of participation, and evaluates limitations and drawbacks. Although few of the claims that are made have been tested, there is evidence that stakeholder participation can enhance the quality of environmental decisions by considering more comprehensive information inputs.
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General Resources Holdings
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Stop misuse of biodiversity offsets
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Governments should not meet existing conservation targets using the compensation that developers pay for damaging biodiversity, say Martine Maron and colleagues.
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Climate Science Documents
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USGS Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center
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Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center (GECSC) researchers conduct multi-purpose geologic mapping and topical scientific studies to address issues concerning geologic, climatic, ecosystem, and land surface changes; human interactions with the environment; and physical, chemical, and biological characterization of the Earth's surface and upper crust.
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Organizations Search
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WWF: China Ecological Footprint Report 2012 Consumption, Production and Sustainable Development
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From the Executive Summary p. 3 : "We have only one planet and the time has come to transform our present lifestyle and consumption patterns in order to halt the degradation of the Earth’s natural capital, and to secure
ecosystem services as the foundation for economic and social development."
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Climate Science Documents