The National Wildlife Refuge Association has laid out their 2010 priorities in advocating for the National Wildlife Refuge System:
Funding: With a renewed emphasis on reducing the federal deficit, as outlined in the President’s State of the Union, federal programs such as the National Wildlife Refuge System are likely to see reduced or frozen discretionary spending across the board. NWRA is asking Congress to fund the Refuge System at $578 million in Fiscal Year 2011, a step toward the recommended $900 million annually that is needed to best meet the conservation goals of the System. Since refuges provide an economic return to communities through job creation, wildlife related recreation, and ecosystem services such as clean and clean water, investing in wildlife refuges benefits both wildlife and people.
Land and Water Conservation Fund: NWRA is also advocating for dollars under the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to complete refuges and create new ones in connection with our Beyond the Boundaries landscape conservation priorities. Created to ensure our nation’s most treasured resources and habitats are protected, the LWCF has used receipts from oil and gas leases to protect approximately 1.5 million acres of land that is now part of the NWRS. The LWCF has the potential to be one of our most powerful land conservation tools, yet it lacks adequate funding to achieve its stated mission — the LWCF has only been funded at the authorized level of $900 million once in its 40 year history. Read more about the LWCF.
Climate Change: NWRA will back funding for the Fish and Wildlife Service, in partnership with other federal agencies, to develop Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). Acknowledging the need for more collaboration between land management agencies, scientific institutions, and local communities, LCCs bring a fresh landscape driven approach to federal wildlife conservation efforts and will streamline efforts to inventory and monitor the vast natural resources in the Refuge System. Visit the FWS LCC website for more information.
While the creation of LCCs, and increased LWCF funding will help begin to address the effects of climate change on wildlife, more will need to be done to successfully respond to even the most conservative scientific predictions. Consequently, NWRA will continue to urge Congress to pass comprehensive climate change legislation that both reduces harmful greenhouse gas pollution and provides funding to help wildlife adapt to a changing climate. NWRA strongly supports a measure that would require that at least 5% of revenue collected from a climate change bill be designated for wildlife adaptation programs, including funding to inventory, monitor and adaptively manage wildlife refuges in a changing climate.
Wilderness Designation for the Coastal Plain at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Finally, 50th anniversaries in 2010 of Arctic and Izembek NWRs in Alaska present an opportunity for the NWRA to generate visibility and attention to two iconic refuges that remain among the most threatened in the Refuge System.
At nearly 20 million acres, the vast Arctic NWR embodies the American ideal of Wilderness; it is a truly rare landscape-level wilderness refuge at a scale impossible to achieve anywhere in the lower forty-eight. For fifty years the magnificent refuge has protected wildlife across the Alaskan arctic landscape, from the coastal plain to the towering Brooks mountain range. NWRA believes now is the time to finally accord Wilderness status to the refuge’s fragile coastal plain to once and for all eliminate the possibility of oil drilling in what amounts to the last 10% of the Alaska’s north slope off limits to fossil fuel exploration.
While we will fight for Congressionally-designated Wilderness in the Arctic, we will, ironically, fight to keep a Wilderness designation intact at Izembek NWR on the Aleutian Peninsula, where an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) mandated by Congress is underway to evaluate construction of an unnecessary and expensive road through the heart of the refuge. NWRA and its partners succeeded last Congress in forcing this comprehensive study on the proposed “Road to Nowhere,” and we’ll work this year to ensure Congress understands that the estimated $50 million in tax-payer dollars required to build this road would be far better spent reducing the deficit. Read more about the Road to Nowhere.
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National Wildlife Refuge System, National Wildlife Refuge Association
