Adaptation

Grow a garden and chances are you’ll practice some form of ongoing adaptation. Before planting, you test the soil PH to determine its alkaline/acidic balance. Once plants are in the ground, you try various mulches to see which ones will enrich the soil, retain moisture and deter weeds. In mid-summer, you adjust irrigation levels and hope the marigolds you planted really will keep the deer away as advertised. By harvest time, the garden’s abundance – or lack of it – offers a final grade on your adaptation strategy. If a gardener’s been observant, they can apply this evolving knowledge for seasons to come.

Minus the tomatoes and jalapenos, the textbook definition for adaptation reflects a similar process: “… adjustments in natural or human systems to various climate stimuli.” Traditionally, those adjustments described the process by which an organism or species became better suited to its environment. Now, the definition includes how society or ecosystems must change to limit the negative impacts of climate change. Adaptation can take place at many levels. There is no “one-size fits all” solution, but there are similarities in approaches across regions and sectors. Sharing best practices, learning by doing, and pursuing collaborative approaches can help ensure progress.

For land trusts, these climate impacts  are evident enough: floods, droughts, fires, invasive species that can throw native ecosystems out of whack. But while land trusts can’t set global climate policies, they can respond in ways  that help landscapes and creatures to adapt. The process follows these general steps:  

• Assess current conditions; identify problems; determine goals.

• Design a management plan to incorporate these goals.

• Implement the management plan.

• Monitor the plan’s impact(s).

• Evaluate the results of the monitoring process.

• Based on monitoring and evaluation, modify the plan as needed.

In steps one through two, you plan as best you can with the information at hand. In steps three through six, your plan meets reality. And chances are, reality may not resemble the nice charts and photos in your PowerPoint presentation. But that’s OK; because adaptive management is meant to be exactly that. And, the next hurricane, heat dome or El Niño will always have the last word. So, rather than delete the whole plan, land trusts often run through steps 3-6 several times to get them right. Along the way, emergent knowledge and observations guide the process. To learn more, these case studies show the many ways land trusts have found adaptive solutions. 

While writing plans may take busy staff away from field work, there’s a secondary benefit beyond the plan itself. The data and analysis required for the plan can be repurposed for grant proposals, articles, reports and on-the-ground decision making. Further, the activities spelled out in the plan can fulfill other management goals and help guide decisions in areas such as stewardship, restoration and risk reduction.

For instance, before you build a trail or a costly shoreline boardwalk for a waterfront preserve, wouldn’t it be good to know what climate projections say about the prevalence of floods in the years ahead? Data and insights gleaned from your planning can help answer that question. And, they might suggest alternative locations or that a low-cost riverfront trail makes more sense than a wooden structure that could float off downstream during the next “1,000-year” rainstorm. As this example suggests, adaptive management can ground truth projects in ways that less-informed planning does not.  

 Since land trust activities are constantly changing to accommodate new challenges, The Alliance in collaboration with the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science, created this Adaptation Quick Guide specifically to support land trusts and serve as a steppingstone for the process of adaptation planning. This Quick Start Guide to Adaptation Planning for Land Trusts gives you a starting point to help you design and implement adaptation actions in your work, with a special eye toward stewardship activities. It draws on the five-step Adaptation Workbook process to help you consider how climate change will affect your lands and your associated goals for land conservation and stewardship. By intentionally considering the potential impacts, challenges, and opportunities from climate change, you can then use this lens to identify actions that enable ecosystems to cope with stressors and adapt to changing conditions, while also addressing conservation priorities.