Abstract
Glacial mountain environments are changing rapidly as a result of climate change and the expansion of nature-based recreation. Anticipatory planning to adapt to such changes is a key management challenge. The aim of this study was to explore how adaptation planning for recreation sites in these areas can be supported using participatory scenario planning (PSP). For this purpose, a study area in southeast Iceland was chosen where management is likely to be heavily impacted in the near future. PSP involves local stakeholder workshops in which participants generate maps reflecting plausible glacial land cover and land use in the near future. This process takes place in stages, including the identification of potential drivers of land-use change, development of multiple land-use scenarios, and examination of the potential consequences of these scenarios and options for adapting to them. The study demonstrates that PSP can be a valuable tool to support recreational land-use planning in glacial landscapes, and to improve anticipatory adaptation to potentially undesirable future changes. PSP also has the potential to provide salient and usable knowledge for local stakeholders, stimulate stakeholders to elaborate on long-term changes and associated uncertainties through scenario construction and visualization, provide insight into the adaptive capacity of current recreational planning systems, and reframe stakeholders' guiding assumptions to encourage a more future-oriented mentality. This approach could be valuable in other glaciated mountain areas and in recreation areas where there are multiple significant future changes in landscape attributes, processes, and uses at play simultaneously.
Highlights
Glacial mountain environments are changing rapidly as a result of climate change and the expansion of nature-based recreation (Welling et al 2015)
The aim of this study was to explore how adaptation planning for recreation sites in these areas can be supported using participatory scenario planning (PSP)
Process developed in this study is the successful integration of socioeconomic and natural environmental changes into future scenarios. This is supported by Bonzanigo et al (2016), who concluded that such integration is a much more effective and realistic way to analyze the impacts of climate change on and responses to recreational land uses than examining these in isolation
Summary
Glacial mountain environments are changing rapidly as a result of climate change (eg Vaughan et al 2013; Huss et al 2017) and the expansion of nature-based recreation (Welling et al 2015). The disappearance of glaciers is viewed by some as a reason to visit them in a form of ‘‘last chance tourism’’ (Dawson et al 2011; Stewart et al 2016), which paradoxically can increase glacier shrinkage due to the heat released by large-scale tourism activities at glacier sites (Wang et al 2019) Despite these projected changes in demand, empirical studies on the behavior of glacier tourism entrepreneurs (eg Furunes and Mykletun 2012; Wilson 2012; Espiner and Becken 2014; Wilson et al 2014) reveal that a majority do not consider the potential further recession of the glaciers to be a significant challenge to their business success and that most respond reactively rather than proactively to these environmental changes, focused on maintaining the ‘‘status quo and waiting to see what happens’’ (Wilson et al 2014: 35). Such areas have management plans, management of protected areas is often hampered by the lack of proactive climate change
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