Impacts of Climate Change on Multiple Use Management of BLM Lands

The Bureau of Land Management has a tough job: to manage 248 million acres of lands for multiple, often conflicting uses. Climate change is making this task more difficult, often exacerbating conflicts or creating new ones. Recent research, published in the journal Ecosphere, from Elaine Brice, Brett Miller, Hongchao Zhang, and others describes how climate change might impact outdoor recreation participation and management through the direct effects of warming temperatures on recreational behaviors (pushing visits to increasingly moderate shoulder seasons, for example) and its indirect effects on recreational behavior, due to impacts on the settings (for instance, changes to opportunities for hunting, fishing, and wildlife viewing).

Climate change is expected to exacerbate threats to BLM lands, and managers will need to consider how these changes will affect public lands and how management potentially contributes to the ongoing problem. As climates continue to shift over the next decades, managers need a clear directive of land uses and priorities in land use plans, and science on climate change impacts on land uses.