References to “Climate Change” Removed from DOI Strategic Plan

References to “Climate Change” Removed from DOI Strategic Plan

On October 25, 2017, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) published a new strategic plan for fiscal years (FY) 2018 to 2022 in which all references to “climate change” had been removed. DOI’s previous strategic plan, covering the period from FY2014 to 2018, had mentioned “climate change” 49 times. It included a detailed discussion of the likely impacts of climate change on DOI’s activities and committed the department to, among other things, “adaptively manag[ing] resources to mitigate the impacts of climate change, consider[ing] climate change on a landscape-level to improve resiliency, and work[ing] across agency lines to develop and provide data, information and decision support tools.” Those commitments were omitted from the 2018-2022 plan, which does not mention climate change or its impacts on DOI’s operations.