Preparing Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife for a changing climate: assessing risks and opportunities for action

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) recognizes that climate change poses challenges to fulfilling its mission to “preserve, protect, and perpetuate fish, wildlife, and ecosystems while providing sustainable fish and wildlife recreational and commercial opportunities.” The agency is already experiencing climate-related impacts, which will be exacerbated as the pace of climate change accelerates over the coming decades.

Concerns regarding the projected impacts of climate change to the agency motivated the adoption of Policy #5408: Addressing the Risks of Climate Change (PDF). The purpose of this policy is to provide guidance for managing risks to WDFW investments due to current and future impacts of climate change. The policy led to the establishment of the Climate Action Team, which recently held a series of workshops which resulted in a climate risk assessment for each program1 within the agency. This report furthers that work by including a discussion of how climate change might affect species and ecosystems in Washington (Section 1) and summarizing the overarching vulnerabilities to agency operations and investments identified in the workshops (Section 2). As a next step towards building climate resilience across the agency it also summarizes potential opportunities for action (Section 3) that were identified by the Climate Action Team.