EcoAdapt -::- Meeting the Challenges of Climate Change

Adaptation ABCs

Are you Gathering information as you go and responding accordingly? This includes information on climatic changes, on ecosystem responses to those changes, on human behavior, on social systems, on governance, on management effectiveness, and anything else with a significant influence on the success of your efforts. In order to learn quickly you need to pay attention to what you are doing and how its working. This means you need some way to evaluate the success of your actions. Call it monitoring, call it adaptive management, call it whatever you will, you need to learn as you go and use what you learn.

Fail early, Fail often, Learn and adapt quickly. We don’t know exactly what will happen due to climate change, and we know even less once its compounded with all the other stresses present on our landscape. Heck, even if we knew for sure what was going to happen climatically, we don’t know what actions would provide the desired management outcomes! We need to develop and test hypotheses not just about the climate system or nature’s response to it, but also about the relative effectiveness of various management measures. We need to create management approaches built on clear and explicit hypotheses about what will work and why, do the monitoring necessary to test hypotheses about management effectiveness, and make sure we’ve got mechanisms for corrective measures. The only way to know is to try, but trying something willy-nilly won’t teach us nearly as much as trying things in a methodical manner.

Are you Engaging stakeholders? Adaptation success requires commitment over the long-haul, local empowerment and buy-in. You can’t create an adaptation plan in a vacuum, it is unlikely to be well received by the community who will be implementing it, and can you risk alienating the partners who are key to long-term success. Make friends, then develop ideas and take action together.

Are you Doing something or are you waiting for more data, more guidance, more money? Taking your time to develop a solid plan of action is an important part of good adaptation, however making development of a plan your only action is not good adaptation. You need to make it happen on the ground to see better outcomes. Remember not taking any action is perhaps even riskier than change if the status quo has not attempted to incorporate climate change into its calculus.

Does the work have Continuity and Connectivity with the world around it? Are you thinking Creatively? Wow, C is a big letter for adaptation! Just as it is important to plan for the Change across landscapes and seascapes by including continuity and connectivity, it is also important to change the way you plan by getting more creative to deal with the fact that what we used to believe worked may not anymore! As D.J. Sauchyn and Surin Kulshreshtha wrote, “We have options, but the past is not one of them.”

Sauchyn, D., and S. Kulshreshtha. 2008. The Prairies. Chapter 7 In: “From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007”, edited by D.S. Lemmen, F.J. Warren, J., Lacroix and E. Bush; Government of Canada, Ottawa, ON.

Are you Buying time for your work and for the natural systems we all care about? While we can’t completely stop climate change, we can at least buy time for species, systems , and our own organizations to respond effectively. For example, species can often adapt evolutionarily to new conditions if they have sufficient time and genetic variability; if we can maintain diverse populations or slow the rate of change, we may buy time for an evolutionarily adaptive response. Similarly, plant and animal communities are often able to accommodate change by shifting location to track appropriate conditions (e.g. shifting inland as sea level rises), assuming that change is slow enough and there is room for communities to move. If we maintain landscape connectivity and slow the rate of change, we buy time for communities to move. When it comes to our own work, do our plans incorporate how conditions might change over time, and provide space and time for us to adapt your approaches? If we are not planning for the future, we will almost certainly fall short of our goals as real world conditions work against past ideals.

Are you acting to Ameliorate existing and likely future effects of climate change? In other words, are you doing your work in a way that takes into account the reality of climate change? If not, your work may be at risk. Actions to ameliorate the effects of climate change can include reducing or counteracting changes (for example, enhancing riparian zone vegetation to help limit rising stream temperatures), reducing the negative effects of changes (for example, including both current and likely future habitat in critical habitat designations for endangered species), or correcting for changes (for example, incorporating sea level rise into a bridge elevation).