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

Abstract

Adaptation pathways is an approach to identify, assess, and sequence climate change adaptation options over time, linking decisions to critical signals and triggers derived from scenarios of future conditions. However, conceptual differences in their development can hinder methodological advance and create a disconnect between those applying pathways approaches and the wider community of practitioners undertaking vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessments. Here, we contribute to close these gaps, advancing principles, and processes that may be used to guide the trajectory for adaptation pathways, without having to rely on data-rich or resource-intensive methods. To achieve this, concepts and practices from the broad pathways literature is combined with our own experience in developing adaptation pathways for primary industries facing the combined impacts of climate change and other, nonclimatic stressors. Each stage is guided by a goal and tools to facilitate discussions and produce feasible pathways. We illustrate the process with a case study from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, involving multiple data sources and methods in two catchments. Resulting guidelines and empirical examples are consistent with principles of adaptive management and planning and can provide a template for developing local-, regional- or issue-specific pathways elsewhere and enrich the diversity of vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessment practice.

Adapting Water Management to Climate Change in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

“…An example of a summary diagram of adaptation pathways for agricultural water use in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. Adapted from [98].…”

Views from nowhere, somewhere and everywhere else: The tragedy of the horizon in the early Anthropocene

“…These will be at a scale far removed from the global and will require participatory, values-based scenario planning processes at the local scale (e.g. Cradock-Henry et al, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c; Oteros-Rozas et al, 2015; etc.) and potentially involving distributed interest groups.…”

“…A key challenge, however, is nesting global, national and local spatial scales in ways that meaningfully link complex adaptive systems, and for these to be accessible for those seeking to implement adaptation processes (e.g. Cradock-Henry et al, 2021a, 2012b; Oteros-Rozas et al, 2015). This can be expensive and time-consuming, and often privileges expert biophysical knowledge with little or no social science component.…”

The conservation long game: Leiopelma species climate envelopes in New Zealand under a changing climate

“…Therefore, identifying habitat which will remain, or become, suitable under climate change is particularly important for the conservation management of relict species like Leiopelma. Adaptation pathway planning is a tool which has been used to identify suitable management options to increase resilience to future climate change, allowing managers to prioritise actions at different points along alternate paths, depending on changing context, such as when or if a nominated threshold is exceeded (Jacobs et al 2019;Cradock-Henry et al 2021). We recommend development of climate change adaptation pathways for all Leiopelma species to ensure the correct balance and staging of in situ versus ex situ management is achieved.…”