Designing Climate‐Smart Conservation: Guidance and Case Studies

TLDR

Conservation practitioners must fully integrate climate change effects into all planning projects, and some are beginning to develop, test, and implement new climate‑adaptation approaches. The study proposes four basic tenets for climate‑change adaptation in conservation: protecting adequate space, reducing non‑climate stresses, using adaptive management, and reducing climate change impacts. The authors illustrate the tenets through case studies of coral reefs, mangrove forests, sea‑level rise impacts on sea turtles, tigers, and national planning in Madagascar. Implementing the tenets makes conservation efforts more robust against climate change, and the paradigm is technologically, economically, and intellectually feasible despite requiring a shift from traditional approaches.

Abstract

Abstract: To be successful, conservation practitioners and resource managers must fully integrate the effects of climate change into all planning projects. Some conservation practitioners are beginning to develop, test, and implement new approaches that are designed to deal with climate change. We devised four basic tenets that are essential in climate‐change adaptation for conservation: protect adequate and appropriate space, reduce nonclimate stresses, use adaptive management to implement and test climate‐change adaptation strategies, and work to reduce the rate and extent of climate change to reduce overall risk. To illustrate how this approach applies in the real world, we explored case studies of coral reefs in the Florida Keys; mangrove forests in Fiji, Tanzania, and Cameroon; sea‐level rise and sea turtles in the Caribbean; tigers in the Sundarbans of India; and national planning in Madagascar. Through implementation of these tenets conservation efforts in each of these regions can be made more robust in the face of climate change. Although these approaches require reconsidering some traditional approaches to conservation, this new paradigm is technologically, economically, and intellectually feasible.