Climate change experts Drs. Lara Hansen and Jennifer Hoffman consider the implications of climate change for key resource management issues of our time—invasive species, corridors and connectivity, ecological restoration, pollution, and many others. How will strategies need to change to facilitate adaptation to a new climate regime? What steps can we take to promote resilience?

Climate Savvy offers a wide-ranging exploration of how scientists, managers, and policymakers can use the challenge of climate change as an opportunity to build a more holistic and effective philosophy. Based on collaboration with a wide range of scientists, conservation leaders, and practitioners, the authors present general ideas as well as practical steps and strategies that can help cope with this new reality.
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With the support of the Sierra Club, EcoAdapt and the Geos Institute partnered to create climate-informed conservation “blueprints” for western Washington in order to highlight and prioritize areas and actions likely to increase the success of conservation efforts in a rapidly changing climate. These maps identify areas that have particular ecological value and are predicted to have greater ecological stability or instability under changing climatic conditions. This information may be used to suggest priority areas and strategic conservation actions that, when combined, may provide species and ecosystems with a greater likelihood of persistence and function throughout the rapidly changing climate over the next 75 years. This report aims to provide guidance regarding the interpretation and implementation of the blueprint maps. It provides a brief overview of the methods used, describes broad patterns and key insights, suggests conservation strategies or actions, and discusses important limitations associated with the maps and results.
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The State of Adaptation in the United States, a synthesis commissioned and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and undertaken by EcoAdapt, the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University, and the University of California-Davis, provides examples of societal responses to climate change in our planning and management of cities, agriculture and natural resources. These examples include regulatory measures, management strategies and information sharing.
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The field of climate change adaptation is in a period of critical transition. The general concepts of adaptation have been well developed over the past decade. Now, practitioners must move from generalities to concrete actions, including implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. EcoAdapt strives to facilitate this transition by (1) providing real-life, practical adaptation case studies to catalyze creative thinking, and (2) synthesizing information collected through interviews and surveys to further develop the field of study and action. The intent of this report is to provide a brief overview of key climate change impacts and a review of the prevalent work occurring on climate change adaptation in the Great Lakes region, especially focusing on activities in the natural and built environments as they relate to freshwater resources (and in some cases, at the freshwater/terrestrial interface). This report presents the results of EcoAdapt’s efforts to survey, inventory, and, where possible, assess adaptation activities in the Great Lakes.
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Climate change is now widely acknowledged as a global problem that threatens the success of marine and coastal conservation, management, and policy. Mitigation and adaptation are the two approaches commonly used to address actual and projected climate change impacts. Mitigation applies to efforts to decrease the rate and extent of climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or the enhancement of carbon uptake and storage; adaptation deals with minimizing the negative effects or exploiting potential opportunities of climate change. Because the benefits of mitigation are not immediate and because we are already committed to a certain amount of climate change, adaptation has been increasingly viewed as an essential component of an effective climate change response strategy. The field of adaptation is developing rapidly but in an ad hoc fashion, and organizations and governments are often challenged to make sense of the dispersed information that is available. The intent of this report is to provide a brief overview of key climate change impacts on the natural and built environments in marine and coastal North America and a review of adaptation options available to and in use by marine and coastal managers. This report presents the results of EcoAdapt’s efforts to survey, inventory, and assess adaptation projects from different regions, jurisdictions, and scales throughout North America’s marine and coastal environments.
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