Salazar picks Alaska for regional climate center

Published on March 11th, 2010

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that Alaska will be the site of the first of the department's eight planned regional climate science centers.

"With rapidly melting Arctic-sea ice and permafrost, and threats to the survival of Native Alaskan coastal communities, Alaska is ground zero for climate change," Salazar said in a release.

The center will be based at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The department hopes to have Alaska's climate science center formally established in six to eight weeks.

Regional centers will provide science about climate change impacts, help land managers adapt to the impacts, and engage the public through education initiatives, Salazar said.

"In short, Climate Science Centers will better connect our scientists with land managers and the public," he said.

The centers will have startup costs of $2 million to $4 million, said Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes. The idea is to have a host institution assemble practical climate science in the region.

"If adaptation plans have to be developed, there can be coordinated action," he said.

The U.S. Geological Survey will take a lead role in the centers.

Hayes said Alaska opposition to federal action on climate change, such as the state's lawsuit seeking to overturn the listing of polar bears as a threatened species because Arctic sea ice loss, did not figure into the decision to put the first regional center in Alaska.

The lawsuit questions climate models that project additional loss of sea ice. Hayes said the centers will focus effects of climate change, not the cause.

"We're focusing in on what climate change is doing to our resources so we can make decision on how to deal with those impacts," Hayes said.

The department will seek grant proposals for four more centers in the Northwest, Southwest, Southeast and North Central regions in the next few weeks, he said.

Salazar in September issued a secretarial order that he said put into action the department's first coordinated strategy to address current and future effects of climate change on U.S. land, water, oceans, fish, wildlife and cultural resources.

Besides regional centers, the order set out to establish "Landscape Conservation Cooperatives" that will engage local and state entities, federal agencies and the public to come up with practical strategies for managing climate change effects.