Article Series: Birds in a Rapidly Changing Climate

By David Leland and Nat Seavy

Our climate is changing, in many different, anticipated, and yet unexpected ways. These changes have consequences for birds – a report by the National Audubon Society found that climate change increases the risk of extinction for two-thirds of North American birds. The question is, what can a local Audubon chapter do to begin to address the challenges of climate change?

Climate change is driven by the increasing concentrations in our planet’s atmosphere of heat-trapping gasses, primarily from human activities. Human responses to these changes are remarkably varied, and can be grouped into two broad categories: adaptation and mitigation. Both involve changing how we do things.

Adaptation suggests accommodating to our changing climate by, for example, adding an air conditioner that we didn’t previously need, or designing bayland restoration projects to better accommodate rising sea levels. Mitigation on the other hand seeks to address the root cause of climate change: the addition of heat-trapping gasses to the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, but also through the escape of heat-trapping gasses, e.g., the escape of methane during oil and gas production and transportation. Reducing our consumption of fossil fuels, whether directly or indirectly, by, say, swapping a gasoline-powered vehicle for an electric vehicle, switching from coal power plants to solar arrays, or fixing methane leaks would be examples of mitigation.

Traditionally, the Audubon Society and its many chapters have been very active in conservation actions intended to benefit birds through habitat preservation and improvements. Such actions are clearly very important and necessary. But because the climate will continue to change in the directions we are already seeing in such striking and devastating ways – more heat waves, more wildfires, warmer and wetter storms with associated flooding and havoc of all kinds – conservation efforts will be forced to continually chase a changing climate. While there is talk of a ‘new normal’, without drastic reductions in releases of heat-trapping gasses, in particular associated with fossil fuel consumption, the idea of a new normal is a chimera, a mirage. For this reason, the National Audubon Society supports the development of responsibly planned and operated infrastructure that is needed for a transition to renewable energy.

As a small step toward increasing our understanding of and advocacy for climate mitigation in California, we will begin writing a series of newsletter pieces that explore positive actions being done or that could be done to phase out fossil fuels, and to relate such actions to benefits and impacts to birds and bird populations. Topics that we will consider include home electrification (including thoughts on what we can do and why It matters for birds), wind power with a focus on pros and cons for birds, battery storage and why it’s important, and conservation planning for a changing climate.

If you have any topics you would like us to consider, please let us know.

David Leland, dfleland@cs.com

Nat Seavy, nseavy@gmail.com