Abstract
Management of protected areas must adapt to climate impacts, and prepare for ongoing ecological transformation. Future-Proofing Conservation is a dialogue-based, multi-stakeholder learning process that supports conservation managers to consider the implications of climate change for governance and management. It takes participants through a series of conceptual transitions to identify new management options that are robust to a range of possible biophysical futures, and steps that they can take now to prepare for ecological transformation. We outline the Future-Proofing Conservation process, and demonstrate its application in a pilot programme in Colombia. This process can be applied and adapted to a wide range of climate adaptation contexts, to support practitioners in developing positive ways forward for management and decision-making. By acknowledging scientific uncertainty, considering social values, and rethinking the rules that shape conservation governance, participants can identify new strategies towards “future-oriented conservation” over the long term.
Highlights
Conservation managers in the twenty-first century are confronting relentlessly increasing pressure to cope with change
Despite established frameworks and principles (Gross et al 2016), analysts note that ‘‘Implementation of adaptation plans and strategies continues to lag...’’ (Stein et al 2013, p. 2, see Jantarasami et al 2010; Wise et al 2014). This can be regarded as the fault line that emerges when new demands are imposed on organisational structures that have been created and evolved to meet the old demands
Drawing on Pelling et al.’s (2015, see 2011) differentiation between transitions: ‘‘incremental adjustments that preserve systems integrity when conditions change’’ and transformation: ‘‘measures that challenge the stability of current systems’’ (p. 116), we sought to establish processes and tools that enabled transitions from traditional approaches to ‘future-oriented conservation’, and to investigate whether incremental transitions could accumulate to larger transformations. This project was formed by a partnership between researchers (The Australian National University, the Luc Hoffmann Institute, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), civil society (World Wildlife Fund Colombia, WWF-C), practitioners (Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia, PNN), and conservation advisers (Equilibrium Research). (Throughout this article we refer to the core collaborative research team members as the ‘research team’, a broader group of engaged policy and management colleagues from WWF and PNN as ‘partners’ and practitioners who participated in activities as ‘participants’.) Collectively, we developed an approach to enabling transitions towards more ‘‘future-oriented’’ conservation (Wyborn et al 2016)
Summary
Conservation managers in the twenty-first century are confronting relentlessly increasing pressure to cope with change. The magnitude and nature of potential future ecological transformation challenges the very foundations of conservation (Stein et al 2013; Wyborn et al 2016). The most commonly accepted norm for dealing with this pressure is to seek out scientific and technical advice for decision-making, including species adaptiveness (Beever et al 2016), ecological modelling (Hannah et al 2017), vulnerability (Metcalf et al 2015) and projected changes (Foden et al 2013). 2, see Jantarasami et al 2010; Wise et al 2014) In general terms, this can be regarded as the fault line that emerges when new (climate adaptation) demands are imposed on organisational structures that have been created and evolved to meet the old (maintain existing ecosystems) demands. As Stein et al (2013) go on to observe ‘‘...while the concept of adaptive capacity is often thought of in reference to the species and ecosystems that are the targets of adaptation action, the ability of institutions themselves to adjust and evolve will
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