CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION ACTION PLANNING FOR GEOHERITAGE IN THE LAKE TAHOE BASIN

Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America, the second deepest, and follows the Great Lakes as the largest by volume in the United States. It is prized as a geoheritage wonder for its stunning clarity and the granodiorite mountains that rim the basin. The effects of climate change, however, are accelerating changes to the hydrology and aquatic and upland ecosystems that are profoundly altering this national treasure. The Lake Tahoe Basin has annual visitation similar to that of a national park, but 65,000+ year-round residents also live within its borders. This combination makes it an intense testing ground for California’s ability to adapt to climate change, as small communities and road networks have intimately woven themselves throughout the basin’s spectacular waters, mountains, and forests.

We have been working with the California Tahoe Conservancy to facilitate a basin-wide planning effort focused on increasing the basin’s resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change. We focus on the linkages between the key resources in the Tahoe Basin, taking a “systems” approach in assessing the basin’s collective vulnerability and those actions that can provide multiple benefits. A systems-based approach also encourages effective adaptation management through multi-jurisdictional cooperation among agencies.

We worked with a science and engineering team comprised of local experts to develop a consistent set of predicted climate change attributes for the basin and developed a vulnerability assessment quantifying resource sensitivity, adaptative capacity, and response/implication. This assessment offers a holistic view of vulnerable areas in the basin that may require targeted actions to improve resilience, subdivided into three systems - Lake, Forest, and Built Environments.

The objectives of the Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan are to enhance the basin’s resilience to climate change, including the ability of its communities, resources, assets, and landscape to withstand and adapt to climate-amplified disturbances and extreme events; to align public and private efforts to take climate change into account in planning and investment decisions; and to inform and increase the awareness of public agencies, stakeholders, and local communities on the anticipated impacts of climate change.