Congress To Examine Links Between Climate and Outdoor Recreation

On Earth Day, Outdoor Alliance and our member organizations launched a campaign to demand climate action from lawmakers. Thousands of outdoor adventurers have joined their voices to demand solutions from lawmakers. Just three weeks later, the House Natural Resources Committee is holding a hearing on climate change, focusing on its effects on outdoor recreation.

We’ve said it before, but the outdoor recreation community has a particularly powerful voice right now. Your advocacy helped to pass a historic public lands package, and has provided the energy for a raft of new bills to improve the outdoors, including a proposal to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund; protect key landscapes in Colorado, Oregon, California, and Washington; protect roadless areas on National Forests; and improve recreation infrastructure on public lands.

Climate is an urgent and complex problem that demands many voices and many solutions. Right now, our goal is to motivate lawmakers to start crucial first steps to address climate change. We can do that by being part of the groundswell of voices asking our elected leaders to step up and address this urgent issue.

Here’s what you can do now. The committee has shared with us that they are looking for stories from the outdoor community about how climate change has affected outdoor recreation. We’re compiling these stories to share in our testimony with the committee. You can also sign the petition to lawmakers from the outdoor community, asking them to take action on climate.