Nature Conservancy Welcomes Lieberman-Warner Bill on Climate Change

Recognizes Impacts in North Carolina

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA — October 19, 2007 — The following statement was issued today by Katherine D. Skinner, Executive Director of The Nature Conservancy in North Carolina:

“We commend Senators Lieberman and Warner and co-sponsor Dole for their leadership on this critical issue, the most important environmental concern of our time.

America’s Climate Security Act is a strong starting point for climate action in the Senate. Climate change poses an enormous challenge to conservation on the ground across the globe and in North Carolina. Conservation organizations will be called on to manage for changing conditions, such as rising sea levels on the coast, that will increase the stress on a vast array of species and ecosystems. In particular, Senator Dole’s co-sponsorship of this bill is important recognition of the severe impacts climate change will have on our state.

In North Carolina, The Nature Conservancy is already pursuing conservation approaches that will help nature cope with the unavoidable impacts of climate change, including an ambitious conservation program to protect our coastal resources.

Among landscapes vulnerable to the effects of climate change, few are in as precarious a position as North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula. The Nature Conservancy has played a role in nearly every protection effort on the Albemarle Peninsula, but we now find ourselves needing to protect what we have already protected—because rising seas brought on by global climate change threaten more than 1 million acres of this low-lying region.

Through our Banks and Sounds Project, the Conservancy will ensure that, as North Carolina’s ecosystems are inevitably transformed by climate change, they are transformed into landscapes that still support a diversity of species and complex natural communities, that sequester large volumes of carbon and that provide human ecosystem services such as clean air and water, ocean and forest products and outstanding recreation opportunities.

This approach is called “adaptive management” and the project is likely the first in the world to apply it to climate change. It is nationally important to the Conservancy’s mission and will be a keystone in the Conservancy's Global Climate Change Initiative.

For more information on the Conservancy’s climate change efforts, visit nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/. For information on the Banks and Sounds project, visit nature.org/northcarolina.

###

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. In North Carolina, the Conservancy has protected nearly 700,000 acres. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at nature.org or nature.org/northcarolina.