affects many biological processes such as the role of trees in hydrologic processes such as fog capture, moisture retention, filtration, terrestrial and aquatic insect production, pollination, nutrient cycling, disease, food webs, and mycotoxins. Soot and smoke from wildfires impact the health of humans. Phenological changes affect availability of traditional foods and medicines, and species shifts and displacements are affecting abundance and productivity within tribal gathering areas. Explicating these and many other interactions was beyond the scope of IFMAT and the team deferred to the expansive literature on climate impacts and the range of future change pathways in different geographic regions, and ecological and social systems. More important to Task I was how tribes found access to knowledge and expertise about these effects and how they were able to apply that knowledge to the sustainable management of tribal forests. Landscape, regional, and national vulnerability assessments are excellent sources of information to set the context, especially when linked to tribal level assessments of vulnerability for specific resources of value to inform important choices, including the extent and nature of landscape partnerships to pursue. The state of the science and knowledge about the interactions in systems around tribal forests and communities has shown that the important central question of climate response is how to sustain stewardship across the landscape and over the long term. The planning and decision- making frameworks of NIFRMA and the key questions of earlier
IFMATs may not provide the appropriate scope to address the expanse and complexity of the climate influence on tribes. This scale mismatch was one of the reasons ITC added the climate, landscape ecology, and landscape management capabilities tasks. Impacts and adaptive strategies for assessing and managing vulnerabilities to climate change of different systems, species, and human values is rapidly expanding. That knowledge is helping build a better base for adaptive decision making which can help tribal forests and forestry programs wrestle with changing arrays of risks, opportunities, and tradeoffs. That can only happen if forest managers, tribal leadership and citizens can effectively acquire knowledge and skills and attract investments to address new challenges. New policies for decarbonization such as advancing renewable energy and pricing carbon through market-based mechanisms have created opportunities for tribes. Some have developed climate action plans that combine adaptation, greenhouse gas reduction, and forest carbon sequestration at the tribe-level or in collaboration with other tribes or non-tribal partners. New roles for forestry programs in these larger climate response efforts are now being defined for forest-owning tribes throughout Indian Country. In asking IFMAT IV to pursue Task I, the ITC recognized climate change as a pervasive and growing driver of forest management context and challenges rather than a singular issue that can be addressed in isolation. It has at least some influence in all the dimensions
of the NIFRMA mandates either through impacts on the forest or in shaping the responses by the forest to management actions. The ITC wanted IFMAT IV to make recommendations on how to better interpret and evaluate the forest and forestry roles in tribal climate response. The IFMAT IV team has framed this task to position climate change as a driver of impacts, threats, and opportunities and an increasing compelling factor to consider in forest strategies, plans, operations, and landscape scale partnerships. Because dealing with climate change has already begun to reshape private and public resource allocations (e.g., fire management costs) and institutional emphases (e.g., social and environmental equity), IFMAT IV wanted to assess the ability of tribal forestry to apply the concept of resilience into the body of forest practices to meet tribal forest visions through a dynamic future. Approach and Methods Reviewing Plans The IFMAT IV team searched for information and examples about how tribal forestry programs incorporated climate change into their planning and decision making. The team built this inquiry around summaries of major impacts and risks to forest ecosystems and forest operations being experienced by all forest landowners and special impacts noted by tribes in their tribal- level climate action plans. IFMAT IV reviewed FMPs, IRMPs, and Stewardship Plans for the 41 IFMAT forest-owning tribes selected for study of evidence of climate change treatment, and reviewed tribe-level climate
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