Exploring Climate-smart Conservation

Rapid climate change poses an unprecedented challenge for the practice of conservation, and managers are struggling to understand how to prepare for and manage resources in the face of climatic shifts. This talk will explore the principles and processes underlying “climate-smart conservation,” an approach for incorporating climate considerations into natural resource management. Conservation planners traditionally have focused their efforts on protecting and managing systems to maintain their current state, or restoring degraded systems to a historical state. Increasingly, we will need to adopt forward-looking goals and implement strategies specifically designed to prepare for and adjust to current and future climatic changes, an emerging discipline known as climate change adaptation. Four overarching themes are central to the practice of climate adaptation: 1) acting with intentionality; 2) managing for change, not just persistence; 3) reconsidering goals, not just strategies; and 4) integrating adaptation into existing work.  Additionally, we will explore several “key characteristics” of climate-smart conservation that will be especially important for carrying out conservation in a climate-altered future, and which include an explicit consideration of the role of landscape-scale thinking and action. Finally, the talk will describe a general adaptation framework to help conservation practitioners put these principles into practice. This “climate-smart conservation cycle” consists of a stepwise process for adaptation planning and implementation, which can either be used as a stand-alone planning process, or to help incorporate climate considerations into existing planning processes.