Protected area management under climate change: A framework for decision making

Abstract

There are over 200,000 protected areas today conserving about 15.4% of the world's terrestrial and inland waters, and around 3.4% of the oceans (Juffe-Bignoli et al. 2014). They provide an effective means of supporting conservation of ecological, cultural and social values. However, they experience a range of threats that park managers must deal with, and now face a new suite of impacts from anthropogenic climate change. Current protected area management approaches may not be adequate to conserve park values as they become more threatened as climate alters because parks were originally developed and managed with the notion of static boundaries with the aim of maintaining current values. Many existing strategies and approaches do not necessarily answer the questions managers need for practical application day to day management as available tools are either lacking in data or very specialised, making them impractical for natural resource managers with limited expertise. There is a need for a methodology and guidelines to assist protected area managers in understanding how their parks and reserves will respond to future climate change so they can make informed decisions and devise possible management strategies.The aim of this research was to investigate approaches to managing climate change impacts on protected areas through understanding and addressing management and planning at the park level.Three key points are addressed to accomplish this, understanding socio-ecological attributes for effective park planning and management, understanding park climate change impacts, and incorporating these into decision making and adaptive management of protected areas. This was applied to four of Queensland's Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage listed protected areas, Springbrook, Lamington, Mount Barney and Main Range National Parks.Most research and planning for climate change is undertaken at a higher strategic level (i.e. regional level and above) with a lack of implementation on-park. Other research and planning effort has been focused on 'off-reserve' strategies to complement and support protected areas on a regional scale. Implementation of socio-ecological values and perceptions in park management are only beginning to occur, which is now recognised as an important factor in adaptive management for protected areas to increase effective management. A climate change adaptation management framework was developed (Chapter 2) to strengthen the relationships between climate change science and the socio-ecological drivers, and on-park management. It sets out the context of the situation to clarify the protected area system's attributes and how they inter-relate. It presents a decision making framework based on a set of strategies aimed at adapting on-park management to The community, protected area neighbours and park managers in the Scenic Rim had a good understanding of climate change and its likely impacts and were concerned about the natural environment. Managers' perceptions were largely aligned wi...