Greener than thou? Parks try to teach climate change awareness
Posted on March 31st, 2008By Lauren Morello
Climatewire: The National Park Service is moving ahead with plans to encourage visitors to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, but critics say the service should look first at its own backyard.
Later this spring, the Park Service, U.S. EPA and the National Parks Conservation Association will formally launch a Web site, doyourpartparks.org, that asks visitors to eight NPS properties to promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their homes and vehicles.
It’s an outgrowth of a broader program, “Climate-Friendly Parks,” that encourages individual national parks, monuments, historic sites and seashores to voluntarily tally and reduce their carbon footprints.
But critics point out that just a handful of Park Service properties — about 20 of 391 — participate in the heavily touted effort, and that the growth is largely driven by the interest of individual park superintendents.
The Park Service, they say, has not undertaken the broad, systematic effort needed to understand changes already occurring in the parks’ weather patterns and plant and animal populations.
“Climate change, more than any other factor in the history of the National Park Service, threatens to impair the resources and values of the national parks,” said Stephen Saunders, director of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and co-author of a 2006 report examining climate change’s effects on national parks in the West.
‘What’s missing is direction from the top’
“Because of that, the highest priority of the National Park Service should be doing what it can to protect NPS from disruption by a changing climate. It’s clear they have not come anywhere close to meeting that mandate.”
Some parks are taking steps to examine and adapt to climate change, said Michael Scott, director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, but what is missing is direction from the top.
Glacier National Park, for example, has long researched the effects of climate change on the disappearing ice sheets that give the park its name. But Glacier, and parks generally, “are not going to be able to solve their problems entirely in their boundaries,” Scott said.
Right now, federal action on climate change is “catch as catch can,” he said.
Those comments echo a recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office, released last September. It found the Park Service and other U.S. agencies that manage natural resources are unprepared to deal with climate change.
The Park Service has not issued “specific guidance” to managers seeking to implement a 2001 order to include climate change in agency decisions, the report noted.
Officials within the Park Service acknowledge they are moving slowly — for good reason, they say, citing the complexity of climate change and the difficulty of understanding how it will affect the diverse set of Park Service lands, which range from the molten lava fields at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to the colonial-era history preserved at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
“We’re getting there,” said Leigh Welling, who joined the Park Service’s Natural Resource Program last fall as its climate-change coordinator. “I wouldn’t say we are completely there — it’s a huge issue.”
One of Welling’s first tasks in her new role is organizing a new series of publications summarizing the climate change already observed in 10 regions around the country and listing areas of significant scientific uncertainty.
“The big question park managers have is, ‘How is it going to affect my park and the resources I manage?’” she said. “One of the most important things we are trying to do is gather that basic information.”
To that end, the Park Service is working with academic researchers, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service to compile the scientific summaries. The first four — covering the Western mountains and forests, the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic coast, and the Eastern forests and woodlands — should be completed in June, she said.
‘It’s not trivial to take on’
Welling is also eyeing ways to help individual parks consider climate change when they are developing their general management and stewardship plans.
“How do you bring climate change as an issue into your planning process?” she said. “It’s not trivial to take it on.”
And then there’s the granddaddy of the National Parks climate change efforts, “Climate-Friendly Parks.”
The program, started in 2003, now includes 15 parks, a number that is expected to rise to 20 by the end of this year, said its director, Shawn Norton.
Parks that want the “climate-friendly” stamp must inventory their greenhouse gas emissions using a tool developed by NPS and EPA, author a plan outlining steps they will take to cut emissions, and develop programs to educate park visitors about climate change.
At Zion National Park in Utah, for example, that translates into running a park shuttle system with 30 propane-fueled buses and installing solar panels to help provide power for the park’s visitor center, among other measures.
Some common themes have emerged during the life of the program, said Norton.
“We know that visitor travel in and around parks can account for 80 to 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions within park boundaries,” he said. “We know we need to work with visitors to get them out of cars, to walk and bike more and to use alternative transportation systems in parks.”
Building energy use normally accounts for another 10 to 20 percent of park greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management — including landfills, composting and incineration — is another 5 to 10 percent, he said.
Grants to deal with cow dung
But the diversity of Park Service sites remains a problem.
Take California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, located about 30 miles north of San Francisco.
The 70,000-acre park, located on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific Ocean, includes beaches, estuaries — and pastures full of dairy cows. Commercial farming was established on the land before it became part of the national park system and continues today under a permit system.
While the park has worked to reduce its carbon footprint — installing solar panels on its buildings that generated more than 25,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, buying hyrbid vehicles for staff use and converting chain saws used by its trails program to run on vegetable-based fuel mixes — the cows account for nearly 80 percent of the park’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The park would like to help the commercial farmers that work its land buy equipment to bury or remove methane emissions from the cow dung produced in their dairy operations, but its help is limited to helping the farmers secure grants to pay for those upgrades.
“We’re dealing with public money,” said park superintendent William Shook. “We can’t really invest our money into their commercial operation.”
One wildcard that could affect the Park Service’s approach to climate change is a hotly anticipated report being prepared by the Interior Department’s climate change task force.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne created the task force last June, saying it would help ensure climate change is being addressed throughout the department.
The report, originally scheduled for delivery by the end of last year, is “primarily looking” at ways parks can adapt to climate change, a department spokeswoman said. Interior officials are currently putting together an “options paper” to identify actions the department can complete in the waning months of Kempthorne’s term, she said.
Click here for a list of parks participating in the “Climate-Friendly Parks” program.