In the face of climate change, it can be difficult to balance environmental, economic and community needs, but it’s a challenge we must overcome to adapt, survive and thrive.
To do this, professionals from multiple sectors across the globe are increasingly incorporating adaptive management techniques into resource planning for all kinds of essential ecosystems – from major watersheds like the Mississippi River Delta to high food production regions like the Corn Belt.
The lessons learned from past management decisions in these places will help shape resilience strategies for communities and industries around the world as they prepare for a new normal.
What is adaptive management and how does it work?
Adaptive management is an iterative decision-making process that builds and expands the resource managers’ knowledge base to overcome high levels of uncertainty and variability over time. The process is built around a set of predetermined goals that support the needs of species, industries and people, and are laid out in a hierarchy with associated management actions that vary depending on present and future conditions.
Adaptive Management wheel. Credit: ESSA Technologies, Ltd.
This management strategy is especially useful for large-scale projects involving infrastructure, like water control structures, because of the inherent flexibility to adjust operations based on real-time monitoring and evaluation of conditions. Key data like this are essential to adaptive management effectiveness, since it is a continual learning process.
Adaptive management strives to achieve the primary goals while minimizing negative impacts and maximizing overall benefits, with an end result of management actions best suited to the environment as it changes over time.
How are adaptive management goals determined?
Robust adaptive management takes into account multiple perspectives by bringing a variety of stakeholders, agencies, scientists and engineers to the table early on to agree on goals, objectives and decision-making processes.
By encouraging consensus through collaborative governance structures, adaptive management can support ecological, economic and community needs simultaneously.
Additionally, an independent scientific review panel can help promote trust in the process and support the science behind decision-making.
How adaptive management can help us increase resilience in the face of a changing climate.
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River basin and watershed managers around the country are already using adaptive management to set goals and address various resource management needs. One example is the Missouri River Adaptive Management Plan, which balances the needs of three federally-listed threatened and endangered species – the pallid sturgeon, the interior least tern and the Northern Great Plains piping plover – along with cultural and economic uses of the river for agriculture, navigation, energy, recreation and water supply.
An example from Louisiana
Louisiana is beginning to develop an adaptive management plan for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a large-scale coastal restoration project. The plan will be a crucial guidebook to effective operations of the sediment diversion in the future.
Photo Credit: Karen A. Westphal, Audubon Louisiana
The sediment diversion is being constructed in an already dynamic and ever-changing deltaic environment with innate uncertainties. But climate change and sea level rise add a layer of complexity to understanding the future of the Louisiana coast, both with and without the construction and operation of sediment diversions.
In Louisiana, there is no time to wait for perfect data, which is impossible to achieve. But adaptive management allows practitioners to take much needed action today while building a knowledge base for future decision-making, ensuring the overall goals for building and sustaining land are achieved, while also factoring in the needs of communities, fisheries, navigation, and other economic and social concerns.
As climate change continues to drive more rapid changes worldwide, adaptive management will become an increasingly imperative strategy for balancing multiple needs and maximizing environmental, economic and community resilience.