Source: Leading the Way on Climate Change: The Challenge of Our Time
The State of Washington preparation and adaptation working groups have formulated a set of recommended strategies for adapting to climate change impacts in the short term, while larger initiatives are underway to reduce overall GHG emissions. The key adaptation strategies are summarized below.
Emergency Preparedness
- Form a Heat Emergency Task Force to review plans for major heat waves and preparedness exercises.
- Promote agreement on forest health and fire hazard response approaches.
- Create statewide drought management strategies, accounting for increased drought risks and subsequent water supply issues.
Incorporate climate change impacts into planning and decision-making processes
- Address sea level rise in Environmental Policy Act and other climate change impacts in land use, shoreline, and flood control statues and regulations.
- Incorporate climate change impacts into emergency planning.
- Incorporate sea level rise and other climate change impacts into state and local government planning and prioritize funding of required initiatives.
Restore and protect natural systems and resources
- Complete species, habitats, landscapes, ecosystem, and cultural resource vulnerability assessment to discover which are most sensitive to climate change.
- Develop better understanding of impact on tree species and implement risk management strategies.
- Identify and maintain protected forest areas that can sustain at-risk species.
- Improve and protect stream flows.
- Develop strategies to respond to increases in invasive species.
- Develop guidelines to address impacts in habitat restoration and protection projects, then direct funds to support them.
Develop and improve water supply and management
- Change existing water resource policies, agreements and laws that limit the ability to manage water resource problems caused by climate change.
- Investigate and invest in water storage to replace snowpack losses.
- Evaluate other options to meet water demand
- Reclaimed water
- Storage
- Conservation
- Efficiency
- Desalinization
- Fund additional research and monitoring programs to improve understanding of available water supplies, water use, and linkages to climate change.
Learn, Share, and Educate
- Build institutional capacity and knowledge to address impacts associated with climate change.
- Engage private sector as partner through market and investment opportunities.
- Develop rapid technology transfer mechanisms to facilitate the use of modeling information in planning.
- Develop clearinghouse for scientifically credible field-level best practices to address natural system responses to climate change.
- Creative incentives to educate farmers about new production methods and drought tolerant species.
- Inform property purchasers and investors of risk of sea level rise affecting coastal property.
- Educational outreach around water use and conservation.
- Educate public to plan and prepare for climate change.
