Reference Document 5-2
Appendix 5
identifying shared RSGCN, North Carolina can prioritize conservation actions that not only provide local benefits but support a regional landscape.
Climate resiliency
Many factors impacting the Southeast regional landscape are often too pervasive for any one agency to address independently, like sea-level rise, changing weather patterns, and habitat loss. While North Carolina must evaluate the impact of landscape level stressors and threats like climate change and land use change within its own boundaries, management efforts must also be coordinated on a regional scale. The AFWA 2022 (2nd Edition) Voluntary Guidance for States to Incorporate Climate Adaptation into State Wildlife Action Plans provides recommended steps for developing and implementing adaptation strategies. Much of the guidance includes taking a broader, regional approach to incorporating climate adaptation into SWAPs. Projections of Earth’s future surface temperatures depend primarily on future emissions and how sensitive the climate system will be to these emissions. Projections of climate change can be examined using two approaches: 1) global warming levels (GWLs); and 2) scenarios. • GWLs are defined levels of warming for Earth’s average temperature that correspond to increases of 2.7 °F (1.5 °C), 3.6 °F (2 °C), 5.4 °F (3 °C), and 7.2 °F (4 °C) degrees above pre- industrial levels (IPCC2018; Arias et al. 2021).
• A scenario-based approach can be used to explore plausible climate outcomes under a coherent future trajectory of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings (Leung et al. 2023).
The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), used projections created with Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) to project and talk about future climate in the United States (USGCRP 2018). However, the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) used newly developed climate projections created with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), that represent plausible trajectories of GDP and population growth, and trends of economic and technological progress globally for the 21 st - century (USGCRP 2023). The climate projections used in the NCA5 were created using global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) that were statistically downscaled to translate large scale changes in the climate under a given SSP or GWL to local scales for impact assessment and planning (Basile et al. 2023). Three of the SSPs used with the new climate models from the CMIP6 correspond to three of the RCPs used with past global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) in their overall forcing levels (SSP1-2.6 corresponds with RCP2.6, SSP2-4.5 with RCP4.5, and SSP5-8.5 with RCP8.5) (Leung et al. 2023). Using scenarios can help inform when the planet will reach a certain global warming level and throughout this section, a mix of the SSPs and GWLs data will be used to show climate impacts. Using available climate change data and information that assumes a specific Global Warming Level (GWL) or SSP-based scenario can allow land managers to consider possible future conditions. Exactly when and if we reach a particular GWL depends on the trends of Global emissions and how sensitive the climate system is to these emissions (Figure 12).
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2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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