The Nature Conservancy created the Southwest Climate Change Initiative in 2008 to provide guidance to conservation practitioners and land managers in climate change adaptation planning and implementation on more local scales. This project specifically aims to: (1) further develop and expand our impacts assessment protocol to adjacent states in the Southwest (Arizona, Colorado and Utah), and (2) apply a vulnerability assessment tool being developed by the U.S. Forest Service and an adaptation planning framework developed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) working group to a series of case-study sites in the four states.
The Initiative released a regional assessment in January 2011 that examines the impacts of temperature change from 1951-2006 on natural resources in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.
See also the fact sheet "Responding to Mega-fires, Drought and Climate Change in the Jemez Mountains."