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Nature-Based Solutions

How hunters and anglers can play a major role in advocating for habitat‑driven climate change solutions.
Scroll to learn more about TRCP’s climate work.

Overview Nature Based Solutions Landscape Categories Projects What TRCP is Doing Where You Fit In

Climate change is affecting our hunting and fishing opportunities.

But healthy habitat can help to slow and reverse these effects, making the push for conservation and restoration more relevant than ever. Sportsmen and sportswomen are essential to securing these solutions.

How can hunters and anglers stand up for solutions that keep habitat working for wildlife and our climate?

10 Climate Change Impacts

Some believe that climate change won’t have an impact for years to come—sadly, this isn’t the case. We’ve compiled 10 ways that climate change is already affecting your hunting and fishing. Download our guide to learn more.

Nature-Based Solutions Use Habitat to Reverse Climate Change

By maintaining, managing, restoring, and improving our lands and waters, we can make habitat work hard for more than just fish, wildlife, and our hunting and fishing opportunities.

Healthy habitats absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere, where it would otherwise contribute to global warming. Natural climate solutions—those that use the power of habitat—also lessen the impacts of climate change by reducing erosion, preventing wildfires, enhancing soil health, protecting against drought and flooding, cooling stream temperatures, strengthening coastlines, and improving the quality and availability of clean water.

Hunters and anglers stand behind habitat-driven climate solutions, of which there are two broad categories: One where work is done to enhance habitat and another where healthy habitat is left alone—and, in some cases, defended from the threat of development—to work hard against climate change.

Nowhere are these efforts more relevant than in Louisiana and Alaska. Both states are at ground zero for climate change impacts, but they also boast impressive examples of these two broad categories of nature-based climate solutions at work.

Approach #1

Work to Enhance Habitat

Example: Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana

Continually battered by hurricanes that climate change has made more intense, Louisiana has shrunk by 2,000 square miles over the last century, as sea-level rise, erosion, and severe storms combined to accelerate land loss and conversion of wetlands to open water. The absence of these coastal wetlands, marshes, and swamps has meant less breeding, spawning, feeding, and nursery habitat for fish, shellfish, waterfowl, and other wildlife. Wetlands are also needed to help reduce inland flooding and erosion and lessen hurricane effects.

Restoring, rebuilding, and reconnecting wetlands to the life-giving Mississippi River has been critical to reducing climate change impacts while benefiting fish and wildlife. Areas like Bay Denesse, in Plaquemines Parish, are being revitalized by diverting river water, sediment, and nutrients that rebuild marsh habitat and wetlands. Meanwhile, efforts to construct terraces of land and fill them in with native plants have brought wildlife and even native trees back to the landscape. The TRCP and our partners are advocating for and implementing these local projects that literally create habitat—often in areas of public land that are open to hunting and fishing.

Approach #2

Let Healthy Habitat Work

Example: Southeast Alaska

Alaska is warming faster than any U.S. state, with profound impacts to fish and wildlife habitat. Milder winters and warmer summers have resulted in habitat loss, the proliferation of invasive species, and shifting migration patterns that are forcing hunters, anglers, and subsistence harvesters to adapt. Alaska’s forests, coastal and interior wetlands, and tundra and alpine systems offer some of our most powerful climate mitigation tools: the natural ability of these northern habitats to store carbon.

In Southeast Alaska, our largest national forest plays an important role in buffering the effects of climate change. The Tongass—a 17-million-acre coastal temperate rainforest—holds more than 40 percent of all the carbon stored by national forests in the U.S. Old-growth forests in the Tongass also provide ideal habitat for salmon and Sitka black-tailed deer, two of the region’s most important food sources. These hardworking, mature forests can’t provide climate or habitat benefits if they are opened to industrial development. That’s why the TRCP and many diverse stakeholders have worked to restore policies that provide conservation safeguards in the Tongass.

SOLUTIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Nature-based solutions are as diverse as the landscapes and waters where we hunt and fish, and projects to improve climate change resilience are already underway across the country. Here are six examples.

Agriculture

Carbon sequestration through the management and preservation of healthy soil, grasslands, wetlands, and forests on farm and ranch lands

Forests

Reforestation, stewardship of late-successional forests, and sustainable management of working forests

Oceans & Coasts

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, ocean warming, and acidification while restoring and employing wetlands, living shorelines, barrier islands, mangroves, and oyster reefs to reduce the impacts of extreme weather on habitat

Freshwater

Nutrient reduction, riparian zone improvements, enhanced connectivity, healthier floodplains, and conservation of our nation’s rivers, lakes, and streams

Wetlands

Enhancing and, in some cases, rebuilding inland and coastal wetlands to maximize flood and storm protection, carbon storage, and habitat benefits

Rangelands and Grasslands

Restoration and conservation of rangelands, grasslands, and sagebrush—particularly native grasses and unfragmented landscapes—which store large volumes of carbon

See these concepts come to life in our nature-based solutions project map below. Click each state for an example of a completed or in-progress project.

Want to nominate a climate-smart project for our map?

What TRCP Is Doing

It will take an all-of-the-above approach to solve climate change. While other experts focus on lowering emissions, transitioning to cleaner infrastructure, and implementing technologies to directly capture carbon, the TRCP is using our expertise to advocate for natural climate solutions in the federal policy arena.

This work includes

Identifying and removing barriers to the adoption of climate-smart practices
Advising agencies and Congress on the best ways to achieve habitat resilience
Building incentives and tools for farmers, foresters, and ranchers to benefit their land, wildlife, and climate
Improving policies to address climate change impacts and plan for the future of hunting and fishing

It’s the TRCP’s stance that climate change is human-driven. While this idea may continue to provoke controversy, the nature-based solutions we’re pushing for should not. Hunters and anglers do believe that we can positively impact fish and wildlife habitat through human intervention—and that’s what we’re calling on decision-makers to support.

Dig Deeper Into TRCP’s Climate Work

We’re leading a coalition of conservationists to develop and advocate for policies that advance nature-based solutions.

Learn More

We were among the hunting and fishing groups who originally embraced this difficult work more than a decade ago and contributed to the publication of two groundbreaking reports that highlight the real challenges our fish and wildlife face as the climate changes.

Download Seasons' End Download Beyond Seasons' End

Visit our blog for more information on TRCP’s recent climate work.

A majority of sportsmen and sportswomen think climate change will affect their ability to hunt or fish in the next 20 years.

Where You Factor In

Hunters and anglers have an important role to play in advocating for natural climate solutions—projects that create more carbon storage and ecosystem resilience by improving habitat. The good news is that most sportsmen and sportswomen are bought in and ready to take action against climate change.

In a 2022 national poll of hunters and anglers, 72 percent believed that climate change is happening and, of those individuals, 74 percent believed that humans play at least some role in the warming of the globe.

A majority of sportsmen and sportswomen also agreed that climate change will affect their ability to hunt and fish (or their children’s) one day, and 19 percent saw climate change as having an impact right now.

Want to Learn More?

and we’ll send you the full poll results

Latest Climate Change News

Looking Ahead: TRCP’s Conservation Priorities for 2026

The year ahead provides hunters and anglers with opportunities to further advance America’s legacy of conservation, habitat, and access

Hispanic Leaders Bring the Southwest to Washington, D.C.

The TRCP organized a spring advocacy trip to demonstrate the power of unity, outdoor traditions, and a bipartisan approach to conservation.

Cornerstone Project to Rebuild Louisiana Wetland Habitat Suspended

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project near the mouth of the Mississippi River is on hold indefinitely, putting larger restoration efforts at risk.

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Hunting & Fishing Access

MAPping Public Access

Unlocking Public Lands

Public Land Access

Brian Flynn, Two Wolf Foundation's Story

Key Issues for America’s Hunters

Chronic Wasting Disease

Wildlife Corridors

Sage Grouse Conservation

Ryan Sparks's Story

Key Issues for America’s Anglers

Forage Fish Recovery

Restoring the Mississippi River Delta

Colorado River

David Mangum's Story

Stewardship on America’s private lands

Farm Bill Conservation Programs

Wildlife Corridors

Sage Grouse Conservation

Ward Burton's Story

Special Places Worth Protecting

Alaska

Colorado River