Following Up on IFMAT III
change funding in the 2009-2012 period. Competitive government resilience and other programs were structured more to support individual vulnerability assessments and tribal plans than for capacity building or implementation of practices to be converted to climate-informed response measures. Recommendations 1. Develop processes and criteria to assure a more equitable distribution of funding for federal funding of climate change response. The total federal funding for tribal climate response grew during the IFMAT III inquiry period as many agencies expanded or initiated new programs and emphases. Yet, despite increasing scientific evidence and traditional knowledge validation of negative climate impacts on tribal forests, there was very little increase in dedicated funding for tribal forest adaptation. IFMAT III found that tribes had not been successful in accessing new and redirected federal funding for climate change during 2009-2012. In 2012, for example DOI received $175 million in climate funds for their Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) program, yet BIA received approximately $225 thousand despite their federal tribal trust obligation for lands that account for 10% of DOI’s land base. The BIA Climate Resilience Program has matured its funding program process and criteria. It has received increased if not adequate
funding to address the range of tribal climate response needs. Most of the funding has been directed at multiple-resource adaptation planning. Forestry must compete in this growing set of needs and must find funding for climate-informed practice implementation in forest conservation and stewardship programs in other agencies and departments. Note: Recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (BIL 2021) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA 2022) substantially increased funds available for climate- informed investments with specific programs for tribes and larger scale program grants open to tribes. Many of the programs in DOI, USDA, and other agencies are directed to forest management and protection assistance and climate response. IFMAT is following the implications for these funding streams for tribal forest management.
Recommendations When NIFRMA became law in 1990, awareness of climate change and its related impacts was only emerging. Consequently, climate change was not directly addressed until IFMAT III, when ITC asked the team to evaluate tribal risk and vulnerability as an additional task. Summarized below are climate change findings and recommendations of IFMAT III followed by the IFMAT IV qualitative assessment of the progress made in the last 10 years. Findings IFMAT III found that managers of tribal forests were already observing the impacts of the changing climate and recognizing the implications on the prosperity and cultural preservation of the tribe and the condition of the forest resource. Some tribes were starting to build climate into practices but few, if any, had integrated climate into forest management planning. The importance of landscape-level collaborations and tribal resource management’s unique roles in these partnerships were becoming increasingly clear. The potential growth of intertribal organizations was being recognized for (1) organizing active practice responses to climate, (2) participating in landscape scale responses, and (3) getting access to science-based information and tools about resilience or forest and woodland carbon. However, the capacity to participate and pursue these leveraged efforts was a primary barrier. Forest- owning tribes had not been successful in getting new climate
2. Require all regional and national assessments of
forest resources to include an assessment of the condition and trends of Indian forest lands under a range of future scenarios. This has not been done. Existing national assessments such as the Resource Planning Act (RPA) Assessment contain Indian forest lands, but do not provide separate detail on their condition and future trends (US Department of Agriculture Forest Service 2022). The BIA Division of Forestry (DOF) annually submits a report to Congress on the status of forests on trust land, including management,
166 Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States
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