Hurricane Sandy ushered in a new era of restoration work, one focused on rebuilding landscapes for the climate of the future. Rick Bennett, the Service's Northeast Regional Scientist, led the program that launched these resilience projects. He's well known and well-loved throughout the Northeast region for his pioneering work leading the Sandy Recovery Program for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversaw the distribution of over 103 million dollars to restore places damaged by the 2012 super storm and to spark projects in other vulnerable areas to bolster coastal resilience against rising tides and increased storms of climate change climate change
Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.
Learn more about climate change .
In the latest episode of Climate Close-Ups, hear him discuss the program, how it shaped his philosophy on conservation in a world of climate change, and how it all played out on a little island in the Chesapeake.
Climate Close-Ups is the Northeast Region’s audio profile series of Service staff members who are working in to address climate change and the ways we think about its effects on conservation. You can listen to past conversations here or here.
