Y es …

1. Yes… Your exam… Your paper – the 17th (or sooner) Your book …

2. A New Year thought…

3. Adaptive management to climate change EVSC 305

4. The question is how do we minimize the short term and long term costs from anthropogenic climate change? • The answer (according to Tompkins and Adger, 2003) is in • response measures that bring together integrated conservation and development concepts and • Response measures that consider holistic response as opposed to mitigation or adaptation. • Adaptation is the action of responding to experienced or expected impacts of changing climatic conditions to reduce impacts or to take advantage of new circumstances. • Adaptation is not about returning to some prior state, since all social and natural systems evolve, and in some senses co-evolve with each other over time.

6. Adapting to climate change requiresbetter use of knowledge and information Climate susceptibility factors for biodiversity • Bounded distributions such as mountain tops, low-lying islands, high latitudes, and the edges of continents • Restricted ranges • Poor dispersal capability relative to the projected nearest suitable “climate space,” including: • Physical limits to dispersal e.g. barriers formed by ocean currents, mountain ranges, desert, fragmented habitat; and • Limits imposed by species attributes, such as slow-moving, slow-growing, flightlessness in birds and insects • Susceptibility to extreme temperatures, droughts, snowfall, winter temperatures, sea surface temperatures, sea level rises or floods Other indicators: 5. Extreme habitat/niche specialisation such as a narrow tolerance to climate-sensitive variables 6. Close, co-evolved, or synchronous relationships with other species 7. Inflexible physiological responses to climatic variables

7. Adapting to climate change reinforces a focus on the delivery of ecosystem goods and services within and outside of conservation areas • Need to *integrate* nature conservation and environmental protection with changing social, environmental, economic, and political objectives

8. Who will suffer the most from climate change? • The poor. The vulnerable. • Thus: sustainable development must be central to any climate change response measure • “We argue that building resilience, which involves increasing the ability of a system (social and ecological) to withstand shocks and surprises and to revitalise itself if damaged, offers the prospect of a sustainable response. Some natural and social systems have a natural ability to bounce back from adverse circumstances, whereas others have to learn how to become resilient. We focus on elements of decision-making, networks and institutions within the process of how to build resilience in both social and ecological systems.”

9. So, what does it mean to integrate conservation and development? • Community management. • engagement of resource stakeholders in developing management strategies to build a constituency for the resource management problem, and to raise awareness of the development consequences and to generate support for decision making • Ecosystem management • “integrates scientific knowledge of ecological relationships within a complex sociopolitical and values framework towards the general goal of protecting native ecosystem integrity over the long term” • Adaptive approaches require flexibility within the management framework to adapt and change as new information and understandings become available

10. Resilience and adaptive capacity • What development options are available to us that enable us to become more resilient to environmental change while contributing to the resilience of future generations? • Typically a binary choice is given… • Adaptation: Actions people take in response to, or in anticipation of projected or actual changes in climate, to reduce adverse impacts or take advantage of the opportunities posed by climate change. • Mitigation: Actions taken to prevent, reduce or slow climate change, through slowing or stopping the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere • But…

11. Responses to climate change Mitigate emissions reducing ‘win-win’ Do nothing adapt

12. Steps • Know the full range of options • Expand the set of options available to different communities or societies • The response space can therefore be expanded through increasing ability to adapt or mitigate, which can be achieved through building resilience.

13. What is resilience? • traditionally referred to the single state equilibrium of an ecosystem • the definition of resilience has changed as it has become clearer that ecosystems have multiple equilibria, that non-linear changes occur and that there are threshold effects where rapid transformation occurs • Definitions now include: • stability as a central concept, • magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed by a system before it moves from one state to another • Thus – focus shifted from controlling disturbances to increasing ecosystem stability

14. Social resilience? • social resilience is the ability of groups or communities to adapt in the face of external social, political or environmental stresses and disturbances • How can societies be resilient? • Ability to buffer disturbance • Capability to self-organize • Capacity for learning and adaptation • Are they resilient? • Recent historical evidence that large-scale, systematic changes in global climate have had profoundly negative consequences for many societies in the past • But: collective response and institutional resilience remains the dominant factor in sustaining adaptation • Flexibility… links across scales… a sense of community… nature of relationships between community members…access to decision-making

15. Institutions for integrated and inclusive approaches • What is collective action? • 3 principles • Smaller groups > larger groups • More equitable , the better • Introduction of selective benefits and alternative institutional design > • The barriers to community or individual action do not lie primarily in a lack of information or understanding alone, but in social, cultural and institutional factors.

16. How the information is presented… • threatening messages – such as CC – move people in one of two directions… • Problem-focused coping • Emotion-focused coping • How much control do we perceive we have? • What is our sense of community?

17. What about uncertainty?

18. Usual structure for natural resource management • problems are identified • goals and objectives are defined • alternatives considered • decisions made • plans implemented • plans evaluated • Ecosystem management approach • recognize the complexity, interconnectedness and dynamic character of ecological systems; • be suited to local conditions; • incorporate people who are affected by or who affect the ecosystem; • work across administrative boundaries; and • emphasize interagency co-operation and the need for organizational change.

19. Problems… • The difficulty in moving towards more resilient communities and ecosystems is twofold. • an incompatibility of current governance structures with those necessary for promoting social and ecological resilience. • adaptive ecosystem management overturns some major tenets of traditional management styles which have in many cases operated through exclusion of users and the top-down application of scientific knowledge in rigid programs.

20. Adaptive social-ecological system management for natural resource management in Trinidad and Tobago ‘trade-off analysis’ • identifying and engaging key stakeholders; • identifying their interests and objectives for the resource; • engaging them in a process of information dissemination and dialogue to explore their preferences for managing the area; • collecting and analysing economic, social and ecological data to understand the impacts of different future scenarios on important criteria; • data analysis; • resolving conflicts that existed • finding areas of agreement among them Result – co-management of coastal resources

21. Consequences of integrated trade-off analysis • 2 critical changes at the community level and in the government level • (1) Conflicting stakeholders mobilized to take both conservation and development actions together. • Why? • More power as a group • (2) spoke with a single coherent message • Contributes to adaptive capacity • Networking social capital • Natural system’s resilience promoted by sustainable management

22. Note… • “Community participation in decision making about natural resources may not always be in the best interests of either the targeted community or the natural resource being managed.” • “the creation of strong spaces of dependence, empowered communities and high self-reliance will not necessarily lead to environmental health improvements.”

23. Ecological resilience and social resilience / environmental conservation and social development • Is it compatible? • Building resilience: • Cement localized spaces of dependence • Expand spaces of engagement • Avoid being tied to specific response paths through the implementation of flexible learning-based management How?

24. Promoting social resilience • Networks and community relations of individuals and groups operating to cope with variability and change in everyday decision making • Wider networks of individuals or groups who may be able to influence the decisions that are being made at the local scale • Reducing the barriers to communication through sharing information and positively-reinforcing feedback • Institutionally: integrated structures