Britt Parker

2015

Climate change, in combination with local threats to coral reefs, presents unprecedented challenges to managers who struggle with how to address these issues. In many communications, managers clearly understand the impacts of climate change and the need to “do something” about it, but time is occupied with more immediate local issues and a lack of clarity as to what they should or even can do. Multiple recent efforts across government, non-governmental organizations, and academia have developed general principles for adaptation to climate change at the national scale; for particular management systems; and from an ecosystem/conservation perspective. These efforts provide important “top down” theoretical underpinnings for adaptation planning. At the same time, a growing body of exploratory work is emerging on “bottom-up” adaptation planning by actual practitioners in the field, including coral reef scientists and managers. There is a need to integrate information and lessons learned from these two approaches in order to connect the theoretical to the practical. The CCAP project approach is based on the recently released guide, Climate-Smart Conservation: Putting Adaptation Principles into Practice (http://www.nwf.org/pdf/Climate-Smart-Conservation/NWF-Climate-Smart-Conservation_5-08-14.pdf) that includes the Climate-Smart Conservation Cycle (pg 5), a general framework for adaptation planning and implementation.The intention of the CCAP project is to provide a coral specific framework for adaptation planning with guidance and tools that managers can integrate into their current planning approach. Through this work we are addressing key questions that managers should ask as part of an adaptation planning process:How is climate change going to affect my resource (coral reefs)? How is climate change going to affect the actions/activities I currently have planned?What additional actions/activities should I undertake to address the impacts of climate change?Are there enabling conditions that need to be fostered to achieve long term adaptation that I can address now to ensure future success?How does climate change impact my evaluation criteria (timing, prioritization, effectiveness, political will, cost, etc.)?In Phase I of the CCAP project, focus on Steps 4 (Identify adaptation options) and some exploration of Step 5 (Evaluate & select adaptation actions) resulted in a draft coral-specific framework and a process to move from Step 4 to 5 in the cycle. Participants at the first stakeholder workshop in Hawaii (July 2014) confirmed for the technical team and USCRTF CCWG that this effort and project was one that was important and should continue. The exploration of climate-smart design considerations in Step 4 especially resonated with participants, and they requested more guidance on how to formulate climate-smart questions and evaluate the potential of individual site-specific adaptations options.EPA has committed to a second Phase to refine the current framework and tackle the evaluation step, and this proposal would fund the workshop component of Phase II to solicit the essential feedback and input from those managers who will eventually be the users of the tool. Key partners include NOAA (CRCP, ONMS, NESDIS), EPA, DOI, members of the CCWG, The Nature Conservancy, and Tetra Tech.

Holding a stakeholder workshop in the US Caribbean to “beta test” the CCAP framework and methods ensures that we continue to work closely with managers and scientists to develop guidance and tools that are helpful to the end user and that will provide a mechanism for managers to incorporate climate change and adaptation planning into the planning processes that they are already using for their site. Engagement with the stakeholders in the Pacific resulted in feedback that not only confirmed the usefulness of the effort but significantly refocused the work such that in the long term the outcomes will be more useful. While many of the managers have agreed to stay involved as we move forward, engaging managers in both basins will ensure that different perspectives, contexts, and challenges will be considered. Working with managers directly in the Pacific also allowed us to explore some of the key challenges in adaptation planning – temporal/spatial scales, working across planning scales, and finding interactions, synergies, and dependencies among adaptation options during evaluation – and gain feedback from these experts on how to incorporate solutions to these challenges into the CCAP framework. The refined CCAP Framework based on feedback from the Pacific stakeholder workshop will be further tested and improved with input from Caribbean managers. This work and the CCAP Framework will also form the foundation and backbone for future guidance to reef managers on planning for and responding to the impacts of climate change. Please see the CRCP Climate Coordinator proposal for further discussion on moving forward on scoping “A Reef Manager’s Guide to Climate Change” with The Nature Conservancy.Outcomes from this project will also feed back into helping to improve the Climate-Smart Conservation trainings that are already being offered nationally through the National Conservation Training Center or the US Fish & Wildlife Service, with applied examples of how the guidance might be implemented by coral reef managers.

• Global

Climate Change

Closed

Funding Ended

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