- Home
- Agencies
- Department of Agriculture
- Department of Housing and Urban Development
- General Services Administration
- Department of Commerce
- Department of the Interior
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Department of Defense
- Department of Justice
- National Science Foundation
- Department of Education
- Department of Labor
- Office of Personnel Management
- Department of Energy
- Department of State
- Small Business Administration
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Department of Transportation
- Social Security Administration
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Department of the Treasury
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Department of Homeland Security
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Goals
- Initiatives
- Programs
Primary tabs
Strategic Objective
Lead Efforts to Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change, Drought, and Extreme Weather in Agriculture and Forestry
Strategic Objective
Overview
USDA will work through its natural resource conservation and energy programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon, while leading adaptation efforts. This supports the Administration’s goal to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
USDA will encourage voluntary practices to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. These include conservation tillage; manure and nutrient management; fertilizer efficiency; planting trees; minimizing deforestation; increasing energy efficiency in agriculture and rural development; and developing renewable sources of energy. Forest restoration, along with conservation easements and land acquisition, will help maintain forests as a net carbon sink.
The Department will assist rural communities, producers, resource managers, and community planners to develop and implement climate adaptation strategies. Impacts that are already appearing include changing water flow, availability, and quality; fire risk; and extreme weather events. USDA will monitor impacts and help implement adaptations (e.g., measuring changes in water flow and then installing stream buffers or upgrading culverts to handle increased water overflow).
The Department conducts and invests in research to inform climate change policy and mitigation and adaptation strategies, tools and technologies. USDA will evaluate the effects of conservation actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to identify effective and economic approaches. USDA is supporting plant variety and animal breed development that maximize carbon sequestration and can adapt to climate change. Work is also underway to develop methods and technical guidelines to measure and model the effects of climate change on ecosystem services and to conduct greenhouse gas inventories of the urban forest and agriculture sector. The Department and its partners will make research outcomes widely available through outreach and extension networks.
Read Less...Progress Update
ACHIEVEMENTS: The national forests and grasslands have made significant progress in their implementation of the Forest Service’s Climate Change Performance Scorecard, with 89 percent of national forests and grasslands in compliance with a climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy in FY 2015. In addition, in FY 2015, USDA announced the Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry, a plan to help farmers, ranchers, and forest land owners respond to climate change.
CHALLENGES: As USDA continues to build compliance with the scorecard dimensions/actions, maintaining resilient national forests and grasslands may become more challenging in the future as climate change effects become more pronounced.
