Information Charlottesville

Last week, the Albemarle Natural Heritage Committee got an update on the county’s efforts to address climate change. The Natural Heritage Committee developed the county’s Biodiversity Action Plan, which became part of the Comprehensive Plan in July 2019. The Board of Supervisors adopted a Climate Action Plan in October 2020. (watch the meeting)

Gabe Dayley, Albemarle’s climate protection program manager, said there are a lot of areas of overlap between the two plans.

“We have actions in the Climate Action Plan around promoting conservation easements, around outreach and education, as well as incentives to the general public as well as incentives to the general public as well as to landowners,” Dayley said. 

Other overlapping goals are to minimize fragmentation of land to preserve areas for wildlife that also can serve as carbon sinks. 

“You know a lot of the overlap here is between strategies for mitigation,” Dayley said. “In other words, reducing our impact or our contribution to global climate change but the county is also beginning a process to do climate resilience planning. That’s more preparing our community to hopefully be resilient and stay strong in the face of some of the climate changes that we know are coming no matter how swiftly the world acts at this point.”

Dayley specifically pointed out goal 9 of the plan which is “develop strategies for biodiversity conservation during climate change.” 

He also briefed the NHC on the county’s 2018 Greenhouse Gas Inventory. Take a look at a story from September 10 for more information. Dayley told the Natural Heritage Committee that development of the inventory included a new tool that analyzed forest cover in Albemarle. 

“We found that somewhat to our surprise that there’s actually a lot of carbon sequestration in trees and forests across the county,” Dayley said. “So there’s an important takeaway there which is the critical importance of maintaining forest and tree cover that we have in the county which I think is something that’s expressed as being important in multiple ways in the Biodiversity Action Plan.” 

To watch the rest of the conversation, take a look at the full meeting of the group. I’ll have information about Charlottesville’s tree canopy in the next installment of Charlottesville Community Engagement. 

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