U.S. Natural Resources and Climate Change: Concepts and Approaches for Management Adaptation

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review. These general principles cover many topics including: (1) how to assess climate impacts to ecosystem processes that are key to management goals; (2) using management practices to support ecosystem resilience; (3) converting barriers that may inhibit management responses into opportunities for successful implementation; and (4) promoting flexible decision making that takes into account challenges of scale and thresholds. To date, the literature on management adaptations to climate change has mostly focused on strategies for bolstering the resilience of ecosystems to persist in their current states. Yet in the longer term, it is anticipated that climate change will push certain ecosystems and species beyond their capacity to recover. When managing to support resilience becomes infeasible, adaptation may require more than simply changing management practices—it may require changing management goals and managing transitions to new ecosystem states. After transitions have occurred, management will again support resilience—this time for a new ecosystem state. Thus, successful management of natural resources in the context of climate change will require recognition on the part of managers and decisions makers of the need to cycle between “managing for resilience” and “managing for change.

Australian protected areas and adaptive management: contributions by visitor planning frameworks and management effectiveness assessments

Protected areas are recognised as crucial for conserving biodiversity and supporting the ecological processes that benefit humans, as well as providing recreational and wellbeing benefits. The complexities and uncertainties associated with their management make adaptive management an appealing ideal. This paper examines how two well-developed management methodologies - visitor planning frameworks (e.g. limits of acceptable change) and management effectiveness assessments - contribute to the adaptive management of visitor use of protected areas. A set of principles was developed from the literature by the authors and used to analyse the performance of these methodologies in facilitating adaptive management of visitor use in such areas in Australia. The analysis revealed both methodologies as contributing to institutionalising monitoring and the development of shared understandings. Effectiveness assessments are facilitating adaptation, with systematic evaluation and feedback of results into management evident. Performance of the visitor frameworks was impeded by a lack of commitment to implementation. Identifying and evaluating future options was a weakness of both frameworks. In sum, however, both provide practical, much-needed means for progressing the institutionalisation of adaptive management and hence contributing to innovative solutions to the complex problems facing protected areas