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Climate Change and the Peel Watershed

The Peel watershed's size and diversity make it vital to preserving ecosystems and wildlife in the face of climate change.

Probably the best way that we can manage natural systems so as to ensure resilience to climate change is through protecting large habitat areas and links between different ecosystems (Honnay et al. 2002, Opdam and Wascher 2004, Heller and Zavaleta 2009). The Peel River is exactly such a place – large, mostly undisturbed, and providing linkages between different elevations, habitat types, latitudes, and biomes. Moreover, the Peel River watershed stands at the northern terminus of the continental-scale habitat connectivity plan envisioned by the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Project. (Jedediah F. Brodie, Joel Berger, 2008)

Importance of the Peel as climate change advances

The Peel is important for slowing the effects of climate change. Landscape-level conservation contributes to mitigation both by maintaining vegetative cover and ecosystem integrity, and thus the capacity to sequester CO2, and by maintaining carbon stored in living biomass and in dead carbon on and in soil. Ecosystems like the peat lands on the Peel Plateau sequester a significant amount of carbon. Maintaining such ecosystems could be globally significant in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from standing biomass and decomposing organic matter, thus reducing the feedback mechanism that enhances the greenhouse effect and accelerates global warming. (Dr. Jim Pojar, 2004)

Large intact, diverse landscapes like the Peel watershed are also important for protecting wildlife and ecosystems from the effects of climate change. Recent studies in climate adaptation suggest that the best hedge against climate disruption may lie within landscapes characterized by inherent resilience. Such areas have substantial adaptive capacity, and the ability to absorb disturbances created by climate change, because of their immense scale, relative intactness, still-functional ecosystems, high degree of ecological representation and redundancy, high potential for creation of climate refugia, and a high degree of robust or restorable connectivity.

The mountain ranges that form the spine of western North America provide one of the most important opportunities in the world for large - even continental-scale - poleward and altitudinal migration, and restoration, in face of global warming and precipitation change. (Graumlich, L. and W.L. Francis (Eds.) 2010) The Peel watershed is at the northern end of this mountainous region. Ecological inertia refers to the characteristic of landscapes to resist change. Essentially, new species cannot move in or displace existing species until space is created for them. Intact, undisturbed, ecosystems like those in the Peel watershed are the best way to promote this inertia and protect the species that exist there.

The importance of the Peel watershed is not limited to its role in harboring biodiversity and relicts of the past...the Peel River stands at an ecological crossroads, connecting boreal forests, arctic tundra, and alpine habitats. Given the pace of current climate change (Walther et al. 2002, Parmesan and Yohe 2003, Root et al. 2003), the Peel River may once again become a crucial corridor for the shifting distributions of species. (Jedediah F. Brodie, Joel Berger, 2008)

See the recent Y2Y climate change report