Application of Risk-Based, Adaptive Pathways to Climate Adaptation Planning for Public Conservation Areas in NSW, Australia

Abstract

Globally, areas of high-quality wildlife habitat of significant environmental value are at risk of permanent damage from climate change. These areas represent social-ecological systems that will require increasing management intervention to maintain their biological and socio-cultural values. Managers of protected areas have begun to recognize the inevitability of ecosystem change and the need to embrace dynamic approaches to intervention. However, significant uncertainty remains about the onset and severity of some impacts, which makes planning difficult. For Indigenous communities, there are intrinsic links between cultural heritage and the conservation of place and biodiversity that need to be better integrated in protected area planning and management. In New South Wales, Australia, management of public conservation reserves and national parks is the responsibility of a State government agency, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). This paper describes the outcomes of a participatory planning process with NPWS staff to, firstly, identify the options available, the available ‘tool kit’, to manage biodiversity and cultural heritage in protected areas; secondly, explore how the selection of management actions from the ‘tool kit’ is associated with the level of climate risk to biodiversity or cultural heritage assets; and thirdly, to understand how the form of individual management actions might adapt to changes in climate risk. Combining these three elements into a series of risk-based, adaptive pathways for conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage is a novel approach that is currently supporting place-based planning for public conservation areas. Incorporation of the trade-offs and synergies in seeking to effectively manage these discrete but related types of values and the implications for conservation practice are discussed.

Climate change adaptation planning for an internationally important wetland, the Muir–Byenup System Ramsar Site in south-west Australia

“…Many authors have contributed to the literature on climate change adaptation approaches for natural systems and some of these approaches are specific to protected areas (van Kerkhoff et al 2019), including Ramsar wetlands (Finlayson et al 2017) and national parks (Tanner-McAllister et al 2017;Jacobs et al 2019).…”

“…These approaches may be the easiest to consider because they are incremental (Abel et al 2016), currently accepted and practiced management actions. However, managers of natural resources are recognising the inevitability of ecosystem change and the need to invest in additional approaches that account for this (Jacobs et al 2019).…”

Biodiversity revisited through systems thinking

“…The aforementioned systems concepts provide both analytical and practical ways of identifying conflict and commonalities in the groups involved in public policy setting. Systems practice from the management sciences can include different stakeholders to enable shared understandings of different envisioned systems outcomes (Davila et al 2018, Jacobs et al 2019.…”

Principles and process for developing participatory adaptation pathways in the primary industries

“…Collectively, these and other approaches acknowledge the dynamics of adaptation contexts, the limitations of foresight, and the need to ensure decisions and actions realize desired outcomes regardless of how the future unfolds (Hallegatte, 2009;Lempert, 2019). These tools and approaches draw on an extensive diverse literature not exclusive to climate change and have been applied through empirical case study analysis in different contexts (Butler et al, 2016;Campos et al, 2016;Zandvoort et al, 2017;Jacobs et al, 2019;Costa et al, 2020;McNicol, 2020).…”

“…There are, however, a growing number of examples of how to develop and apply pathways at the local and regional scale, in the context of multiple, interacting stressors, using inclusive, participatory approaches (Bosomworth and Gaillard, 2019). These cases range from biodiversity and conservation (Jacobs et al, 2019), freshwater and marine management (Costa et al, 2020;Skrimizea and Parra, 2020), climate change, and more (Butler et al, 2016;Campos et al, 2016;Prober et al, 2017;Zandvoort et al, 2019;McNicol, 2020).…”