Florida sees thriving future if climate resilience can be managed
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May 3, 2024
Climate predictions in Florida, for the most part, make pretty grim reading. Rising oceans threaten to submerge most of the state by the end of the century, and soaring temperatures could make it too hot to live here anyway.
But new research by a coalition of prominent universities paints a more upbeat picture of Florida’s future as a thriving state for humans and wildlife, with natural resources harnessed to mitigate the worst effects of the climate emergency generally, as well as extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods.
Such a prosperous tomorrow, the authors say, can only follow essential preparatory work today.
One key element, an 18m-acre swath of protected land called the Florida wildlife corridor, is already mostly in place, and will spearhead Florida’s climate resilience if properly managed and allowed to evolve, the researchers believe.
“We are very blessed in Florida to have the opportunity to have a land conservation project as ambitious as the wildlife corridor, and right now a little over 30% of the state is permanently conserved,” said Joshua Daskin, conservation director of Archbold Biological Station, an ecological research non-profit that compiled the report in collaboration with five universities from Tallahassee to south Florida.
“Without decades of work by conservationists, by state agencies, by non-profits, by landowners, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to reap the benefits of resilience to fires, storms, floods and heat.”
The study makes a number of recommendations for the corridor, a private-public partnership finally approved by the Florida legislature in 2021 after years of planning, with a vision for a single, unrestricted wildlife passageway running hundreds of miles from the southern Everglades to the Alabama border.
To read the full article, click here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/03/florida-climate-future
