Sierra Nevada Alliance Water & Climate Change Campaign

River Network Partner, the Sierra Nevada Alliance, is doing some excellent work to address climate change through their Sierra Water and Climate Change Campaign. Through this program, SNA has been collecting case studies and compiling resources to alert the public and decision makers to the impacts of climate change in the Sierras and ensure that smart local resource management plans are adopted that protect natural resources by reducing emissions and adapting to the changing climate.

A stated goal of SNA’s Sierra Water and Climate Change Campaign is to “tap the rocket” before it’s too late. As they describe on their website:

Climate change is impacting the Sierra now and future impacts could be catastrophic. The Sierra Nevada supplies 55% of California’s developed water as well as most of the water to Northwestern Nevada through a vast water delivery system that is highly dependent on the Sierra snowpack. Over the past 100 years, there has been a 25% reduction in runoff from April to July in the Central Sierra-Sacramento Region and a 10% reduction in runoff in the Southern Sierra. Leading scientists agree that temperature will rise even under the best emission reduction scenarios. This increase in temperature will result in a projected decline of 25-40% of the snowpack between 2025 and 2050. By the end of the century, losses could reach 75-90%.
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The Sierra Nevada Alliance Sierra Water & Climate Change Program is an ambitious effort to tap the rocket. If you tap a rocket when it first takes off, the course of the rocket is drastically changed with minimum effort. However, if you try to change the rocket’s course long after take off, the amount of energy required is exponentially greater. At the Alliance, we believe the next three years are our opportunity to tap the rocket of climate change and water issues. If we engage now, we have the best opportunity to ensure natural resource protection is highly valued when planning how to adapt California's water delivery system and other resource management practices for climate change.

A number of great resources are already up on SNA’s Water and Climate Change page. Among the most valuable is the Sierra Climate Change Toolkit (PDF), which “focuses on how resource planners and empowered individuals can successfully plan for future climate change and adapt our lifestyles and management practices to address the ongoing effects of global warming.”

Their most recent publication is the second edition of a quarterly series highlighting case studies of adaptation and mitigation models applicable to the Sierra Nevada. These models are also applicable to other regions of the country. This edition features a couple of case studies examining the efforts of the town of Keene, NH and the Canadian non-profit Columbia Basin Trust to address emission reduction and adaptation in local land use planning. Click here to download the second edition of SNA’s Climate Change Case Studies (PDF).