Lara J. Hansen is Executive Director of EcoAdapt, a nonprofit organization focused on adapting conservation and resource management to climate change.

Jennifer R. Hoffman is Director of projects for EcoAdapt. With Jennifer Biringer, they wrote and edited Buying Time: A User&;s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems.

In the Beginning

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one "less traveled by"—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

We are at a crossroads—or perhaps a traffic circle—of options about our future, including decisions about how we react to the reality of climate change. We must decide not only what to do about greenhouse gas emissions but also how to respond to the myriad effects of climate change as they continue to manifest themselves around our planet. Included in these choices is how we rethink natural resource conservation and management in light of climate change.

For more than a century the collective focus has been on protecting resources as they are, restoring them to what they were at some previous time, or using them based on past experience and understanding. Unfortunately, past and even present conditions are not likely to resemble the future. We are already seeing alterations in the natural world as a result of climate change. Warmer temperatures, different precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, acidifying waters, and greater climatic variability are leading us to new and ever-changing environmental conditions. This means we need to reconsider our goals and objectives and the tools we use to meet them. We may not need to abandon our goals, but we certainly need to examine thoughtfully how to achieve them given this new reality.

In this book we will explore how the world is changing and how our perspective can adjust to keep up when it comes to protecting and managing nature and the resources it provides. We will begin with an exploration of climate change basics and a look at where the world is today. Obviously this small tome cannot cover the myriad changes afoot, nor provide a detailed exposition on how climate change and adaptation may play out in every corner of the world. It certainly cannot tell you with certainty what the future will be—no one can. We hope, however, that it gives you a broad-brush outline to flesh out based on your own local knowledge. At the very least it may help you to avoid overlooking key categories of climate change impact and vulnerability that may be lying in wait to thwart your long-term success.

With climate change basics as a foundation, we explore what is meant by the term adaptation in the climate world. In any field, some terms get bandied about with no clear sense of what they mean, and adaptation runs the risk of being such a term. Soulé (1986) posited that the creation of the field of conservation biology was possible only when there was a critical mass of people who self-identified as conservation biologists. In the case of climate change adaptation (as distinct from evolutionary adaptation; see box 1.1), the term appeared in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, well before there was a critical mass of practitioners behind it. The number of climate adaptation practitioners is growing, but the field is still poorly defined and rapidly evolving. Because of the potential for adaptation-specific funding, some groups are working hard to define adaptation based on what would bring them funding rather than what would best reduce vulnerability to climate change. Even the terminology itself is confusing (see, for example, box 1.2). Policy and management decisions are moving ahead despite these limitations, so we must build a common understanding of what we are all working toward. This book attempts to lay out a framework, or philosophy, to help move this dialogue along.

Having a philosophy or a framework is all very well, but without techniques and tools you cannot get very far. We spend a good deal of the book exploring the wealth of conservation and resource management tools, their vulnerabilities to climate change, and how they can be implemented in ways that maintain or increase their effectiveness. This includes many old friends—protected areas; species-based protection; connectivity; regulating harvests; reduction of pollutants; control of invasive species, pests, and disease; and restoration—but adds a new spin to how they can be applied to deal with climate change.

Along the way we offer some thoughts on how to use models, a mainstay of climate change science and planning, as well as options for integrating the needs of humans and nature to increase the likelihood of success for both and how to use and improve governance mechanisms to support adaptation efforts. And, of course, we explore the most important tool for developing and implementing adaptation: creative thinking.

A Brief History of Adaptation

Following the completion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) first Impacts Assessment in 1990, there was an identified need for a standard framework to create comparable data across studies. This led to the IPCC Technical Guidelines for Assessing Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation (Carter et al. 1994). These early guidelines laid out some definitional and mechanistic needs that the inorganically derived field of adaptation required (see box 1.4). As mentioned, unlike most fields where a group of interested parties creates a discipline from the bottom up, adaptation has been created from the top down almost by edict from the IPCC and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As a result, adaptation has no formal discipline to which to refer, no evolutionary or reverential literature, and no pedagogical process or best practices for training new practitioners. It is a field almost reinvented by each new participant. This is a challenge for a field that requires urgent translation of concepts into practice if it hopes to be effective.

Although climate change adaptation is still developing, it can take advantage of what we have learned about effective...