Implementing Climate-Smart Conservation

In our first report, Climate-Smart Tools to Protect California’s Freshwater Biodiversity (Sommer et al. 2024), we reviewed a broad suite of tools available to address the urgent problem of safeguarding California’s freshwater biodiversity in the changing climate. This toolbox includes some familiar approaches—such as various ways to improve freshwater habitat—as well as approaches that may be less familiar, more experimental, and more controversial. We also recommended the adoption of a climate-smart conservation planning process, involving a broad range of stakeholders, to prioritize the selection of tools within watersheds and to adaptively implement those tools.

In this follow-up report, we explore the feasibility of implementing these tools and climate-smart planning in light of legal, policy, and institutional factors.2 Our analysis draws on an extensive review of the legal

literature on ecosystem and protected species management, as well as interviews and small workshops with a wide-ranging set of 45 experts from all over the state. These experts are working on the frontlines of ecosystem policy and management; they include state and federal regulators, members of the environmental conservation community, legal professionals, and representatives of many entities involved in water and land management.