The compounding impacts of anthropogenic (man caused) climate change pose the most significant and immediate threat to the wellbeing of communities in the Desert Southwest, and indeed throughout the developing world. In the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez) many coastal communities, including the eight communities of the far northern Gulf’s Sonoran Corridor rely directly on productive fisheries and other crucial ecosystem services for both their economic and cultural prosperity. Unless we act collectively now on their behalf, the consequences of climate change on these vulnerable communities and the habitats they depend on could be catastrophic.
In 2018, together with CEDO’s then Executive Director (now Emeritus), Peggy Turk Boyer, I co-created and illustrated a resource for our large bi-national and bi-lingual audience using the time-honored format of our institution’s annual calendar and tide chart. This popular and widely distributed resource had the theme, Adapting to a Changing Climate (in the Desert Southwest), and aimed to introduce our bi-national public to the impacts of climate change on coastal and marine ecosystems while highlighting the crucial work that CEDO is doing to address the social, political, economic, and environmental changes already taking place in Mexico, the United States, and beyond.