tribal, intertribal, and landscape scale strategies. These issues are outlined below. Lack of policy emphasis and guidance Some tribal forest management programs have begun to incorporate tribal multiple-risk management and contemporary thinking about climate issues into planning and implementation. Much new science has been developed about forest health and disturbance, the role of the changing climate as well as forest density and composition management in ameliorating the impacts of interacting stressors. Climate is being worked slowly into national programs, initiatives and funding for fire, forest health and other climate-driven risks. Despite agency and some tribal claims of climate resilience emphasis and some success stories, it is difficult to identify climate response objectives or outcome measures in agency activity reporting. Although there is energetic emphasis and increased funding in the Tribal Resilience Program, water, fish and wildlife, human health, and economic adaptation strategies, BIA’s forestry policies and programs show little evidence of climate response guidance or emphasis. Advances on climate response have been “bottom-up” and difficult to track. Larger tribes have been more inclined and able to develop overarching climate adaptation or action plans that cover multiple climate-driven issues. Some have used the processes and frameworks of the IRMP to cover influences on the tribal vision and interactions among values and capabilities. The fading
“I don’t want to be the witness to see the last fish.” —IFMAT IV focus group participant
roles and priorities for climate adaptation have not been clearly defined in program guidance and budget allocation. Only recently have these programs included climate response in their stated objectives and priorities. Even for programs directed to climate response, such as BIA’s Tribal Resilience Program, little funding has been directed at improving forestry “nature-based solutions” of climate-informed forest plans. It is not possible at this time to estimate the total funding needed from all sources to address the tribal forest climate responses as so few tribes have made comprehensive vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans. Also missing is the proportion of agency and external funding that might be available for helping tribal forest managers fill these needs. Much of this funding is competitive, scattered across multiple agency sources, smaller scale, and non-recurring, making it difficult and costly for tribes to grow reliable funding streams at large enough scales. Some of the grant application processes are prohibitively complicated and pose multiple restrictions. Most of the climate dollars have been focused on making ecological, wildlife, and water resilience investments with little opportunities to bring in forest program issues. In some cases, the forest managers felt that access to these dollars would mean that the forestry program would have to pay for so much of the work as to starve other important actions.
emphasis and participation in Integrated Resource Management Planning (see Task F) may have discouraged tribes from organizing to address a similar breadth of issues and interactions and perceived climate planning to be even more difficult or duplicative. Tribes with active IRMP and FMP processes seemed to find addressing climate impacts less overwhelming and could more easily recognize the importance of climate impacts and responses to multiple values. Policies that have discouraged FMP revision may have discouraged tribes with severely limited planning capacities from taking on climate impacts for fear of becoming overwhelmed. Some of these tribes purposely limited responses to climate in their planning for specific disturbances such as fire and specific practices such as prescribed burning, having to defer more comprehensive yet more cost-effective approaches to resilience building. Coordination and availability of climate change funding Tribes have been caught until recently between competing general climate change funding programs with relatively little being offered for forests and forestry and/or tribal topics. Conservation assistance programs administered by BIA and other DOI agencies and the Forest Service, NRCS, and other USDA agencies programs have addressed forest practices and infrastructure improvement needs for many years, but the
170 Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States
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