Abstract
The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and National Park Service (NPS) have highlighted climate change as an agency priority and issued direction to administrative units for responding to climate change. In response, the USFS and NPS initiated the North Cascadia Adaptation Partnership (NCAP) in 2010. The goals of the NCAP were to build an inclusive partnership, increase climate change awareness, assess vulnerability, and develop science-based adaptation strategies to reduce these vulnerabilities. The NCAP expanded previous science-management partnerships on federal lands to a larger, more ecologically and geographically complex region and extended the approach to a broader range of stakeholders. The NCAP focused on two national forests and two national parks in the North Cascades Range, Washington (USA), a total land area of 2.4 million ha, making it the largest science-management partnership of its kind. The NCAP assessed climate change vulnerability for four resource sectors (hydrology and access; vegetation and ecological disturbance; wildlife; and fish) and developed adaptation options for each sector. The NCAP process has proven to be a successful approach for implementing climate change adaptation across a region and can be emulated by other land management agencies in North America and beyond.
Highlights
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines adaptation as “initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects” and mitigation as “implementing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance sinks” [1]
We reviewed current U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and National Park Service (NPS) management objectives and practices to determine barriers for adapting to climate change and information needs for building agency capacity to respond to climate change
Over 300 USFS and NPS employees from all sectors of the workforce and their partners attended the workshops, which were supported by unit supervisors
Summary
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines adaptation as “initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects” and mitigation as “implementing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance sinks” [1]. Adaptation, will be necessary despite the extent and success of mitigation because of the slow response of the climate system to greenhouse gases that have already been emitted. Agency strategies focus on increasing climate change awareness, assessing the vulnerability of natural, social, and cultural systems, and developing adaptation strategies to reduce vulnerabilities and increase resilience. Several tools and process have been developed to achieve these goals [3,4,5], and one that has been shown to be successful is science-management partnerships [6,7]. Effective collaboration across jurisdictional boundaries has been a significant challenge for federal agencies, science-management partnerships have been valuable in achieving cross-boundary coordination in climate change adaptation
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