Science Planning for Climate Adaptation: What to do when you can't do it all

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) provide an international response to the need for better informed natural resource adaptation and mitigation in the face of climate change and other environmental stressors.  Hundreds of potential climate-induced impacts are affecting interconnected marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems and species that depend on them.  Given limited budgets and capacity, LCCs need to narrow their areas of focus.  The North Pacific LCC developed a series of steps to achieve consensus among diverse tribes, agencies and organizations concerning science priorities.   Based on literature reviews, expert interviews, surveys, and focus groups, an “impact matrix” scoring tool was developed that included several hundred potential interactions between known climate drivers and valued resources.   The North Pacific LCC was able to narrow our focus to five priority topics using guiding principles, agreed-upon definitions of impacts, criteria and additional scoring.  Working collaboratively with managers, actionable climate change adaptation planning and implementation can be developed in these five focused areas.