Across the National Park System, climate-change impacts are reaching into virtually all of the more than 420 units. But a 2022 study of how parks were reacting to those impacts found a lack of cohesiveness in evaluating vulnerabilities to those impacts. 

Although the report was dated 2022, it chronicled the status of climate change activity as of 2018. Today National Park Service officials are declining to state whether any similar overall analysis has been done in the intervening years, a time during which the government has made considerable strides overall in climate activities.

The officials did point out to the National Parks Traveler that the agency received $195 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding for ecosystem resilience, restoration, and environmental planning needs. An NPS web page on the funding includes mention of many climate-related projects, though it’s impossible to determine whether the projects have started or if they are following the recommendations in the 2022 report.

Among the concerns that arose in the report, Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments in the National Park Service, were the “small number” of assessments for cultural resources within the park system. That aspect recently caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Arizona, who recently asked the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the Park Service’s approach to protecting cultural resources from climate change impacts and progress it's making.

“It is vital that NPS’s climate-change efforts model cultural resource vulnerability assessments in areas of historic significance,” wrote Grijalva, the ranking member on the House Natural  Resources Committee. “This specific type of sustainability planning is important given the potential threat of losing our collective cultural heritage or aspects of their significance when making climate-related changes.”

The congressman's staff said Grijalva sent the request to GAO "so that it could be an independent evaluation." In reply, the GAO notified the congressman on Wednesday that "[A]t the current time we anticipate that staff with the required skills will be available to initiate an engagement in about nine months."

Cultural resources generally include things like archaeological sites such as those at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and Historic Jamestown at Colonial National Historical Park, historic structures such as the farm building at the Fairfield Plantation where Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson died and the log cabins in Cades Cove at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and museum collections, such as artifacts from the 1770s from the people who lived in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York and at Fort Stanwix during the American Revolution. 

Troubling Findings

While Park Service staff in Washington had provided the Traveler with the 2022 report when asked for information on infrastructure, including historic structures, at risk from climate change before Grijalva’s letter came to light, they refused to discuss its findings, saying “we aren’t going to respond to an elected official’s letter to another government agency through the press.”

The report evaluated how the Park Service was assessing climate-change vulnerabilities not just to cultural resources, but also to natural resources and infrastructure in the park system. Where things stand today in terms of the existence and detail of overall vulnerability assessments is hard to say in light of the Park Service’s refusal to discuss the report or its outcomes. 

But some of the findings are troubling. For instance, the Executive Summary states that: 

• The NPS has “limited capacity” to design or execute vulnerability assessments.  
• Inconsistencies in archiving vulnerability assessments have impeded “discovering and acquiring” those assessments.  
• The NPS should “identify and, where possible, focus on key vulnerabilities that most threaten conservation or management goals.”  

Under the report’s section on Best Practices and Recommendations, the study: 

• Recommended a “detailed asset-specific exposure assessment” for entire regions.  
• Recommended that NPS produce a sensitivity analysis for cultural resources at risk from climate change.  
• Recommended development of adaptation strategies for cultural resources, and a prioritization of those strategies.  

Regarding vulnerability assessments for natural resources in the parks, the report stated that just 23 parks “had a comprehensive assessment that synthesized existing climate change vulnerability data to identify key climate impacts and vulnerabilities to priority resources.”  

The report carried a number of “best practices” for assessing the vulnerability of natural resources to climate change. For example, it called for parks to consider how “sensitive” resources are to different climate-change impacts. For example, are some immune from sea-level rise but susceptible to long-running drought or fire? 

How exposed to climate-change impacts is another consideration parks should take to their natural resources, the report added, and can some resources adapt to impacts? 

“Of the 40 natural resources vulnerability assessments that explicitly claimed to evaluate vulnerability, only about half directly addressed at least one of these three aspects [sensitivity, exposure, adaptive capacity] of vulnerability and only 11 addressed all three,” the report noted. “However, the remaining studies all evaluated aspects of sensitivity and exposure, although they did not explicitly use those terms.”

The section on cultural resources noted that, as of spring 2018, just 14 vulnerability assessments had been prepared across the park system. At the time, “[R]esearchers and National Park Service managers alike have pointed out a lack of subject matter expertise in integrating natural and cultural resources and facilities, and insufficient project time to dedicate to a focused, collaborative process,” the report stated. 

NPS In 2014 Committed To Documenting Vulnerabilities

The authors also noted that when the Park Service developed its Climate Change Response Strategy in 2012, it called for the agency to “develop, prioritize, and implement management strategies to preserve climate-sensitive cultural resources.” That recommendation was reaffirmed by the Park Service in 2014.  

“Documenting the vulnerability of resources to climate change is central to a scientifically sound, transparent, and replicable method to prioritize actions to protect resources under threat of climate change impacts,” the agency said in 2014 in a policy memorandum pertaining to climate change and cultural resources.  

Again, due to the Park Service's refusal to discuss where things stand in regards to the 2022 report and its recommendations, it's impossible to say what progress has been made in these areas.

The 2022 report also said that the Park Service’s ability to document vulnerability assessments for cultural resources was hampered by the decentralized nature of the agency. 

“The NPS now faces the following challenges: 1) cultural resources vulnerability assessment (CRVA) products (reports, publications, summaries, etc.) are archived in multiple locations in varied formats,” the authors noted. “These products are not readily discovered nor acquired, and 2) analysis of gaps and best practices of the aggregate of these reports has not been conducted. These challenges present obstacles to investigators, subject matter experts, and agency decision-makers to conduct VAs in an informed manner. As a result, new VAs are proceeding without the benefit of knowledge gained from prior efforts.” 

The report also pointed out that as of Spring 2018, no cultural resource vulnerability assessments had been prepared in either the Park Service’s National Capitol Region or Intermountain Region, while the Midwest Region and Alaska Region had each prepared just one, the Southeast Region just two, and the Pacific West Region just five.  

As for the $195 million the Park Service received in Inflation Reduction Act funding to meet critical ecosystem resilience, restoration, and environmental planning needs, it is supporting a wide range of projects, from cleaning up abandoned mine lands and getting youth involved in climate change education and outdoor recreation to bison conservation, battling invasive species, and climate-change resiliency projects.

Among the climate-change related projects are:  

• Studies into how to manage floodplains in park units in the East [$500,000].
• Work to reverse the loss of seagrass meadows in places such as Acadia National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore, Fire Island National Seashore, Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, and both Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores [$800,000].
• Work to “Assess and Address Vulnerability of Fish Species to Climate Change in Eastern National Parks" [$1.84 million].
• Efforts to “Expand Capacity to Address Large-Scale Climate Change Initiatives for Cultural Resources" nationwide [$3.54 million].
• Work to develop "National Climate Change Guidance and Tools for Cultural Resources" [$1.54 million].
• Work to “Provide Critical Care to Cultural Resources at Risk in Alaska from Climate Change" [$2.5 million].
• Work to "Create A Comprehensive Flood-Risk Geospatial Layer for Historic Buildings, Structures, and Landscapes" in parks in the District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia [$1.6 million].
• Development of “A Strategic Approach To Building Forest Resiliency in Southeast Parks" in parks in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi [$500,000].
• Work to "Determine the Vulnerability of Park Water Supplies To Climate Change" in park sites in Utah [$2.1 million].
• Work to come up with a strategy for “Managing River and Riparian Ecosystems in the Midwest Under Climate Change" in Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Wisconin and Minnesota [$600,000].
• Work leading to “Increasing Coastal Resilience Through Salt Marsh Restoration and Conservation" in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina [$2.5 million].
• Work to "Control Feral Swine to Protect Natural and Cultural Resources in the Southeast and Texas Parks" at Cumberland Island National Seashore, Padre Island National Seashore, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park [$3.5 million].

Many other projects can be found at this page.

“This work will continue over the next decade to address climate change vulnerabilities in the National Park Service,” the Traveler was told.