Human activities are causing high rates of biodiversity loss by reducing, degrading and fragmenting natural areas. Layered upon these stressors are the added effects of global climate change. Science is showing that species unable to tolerate changing conditions will either perish locally or shift their geographic ranges to find more favorable environments. Rather than continuing to protect species within localized areas, there is a need for conservation to embrace a more dynamic view of landscapes to enable persistence within and beyond protected areas. Conservation science has offered many approaches to support planning efforts adapted for changing climate. An unintended consequence, however, has emerged from this broad choice set; the difficulty in determining if approaches are complementary, competing, or even contradictory options. This breeds confusion, and as a consequence, important conservation decisions and actions may be delayed or avoided altogether because of a perceived risk that any particular choice may be misguided.
To overcome inaction, conservation practitioners now have at their disposal the Yale Climate Adaptation Framework; a flexible portfolio of six spatially explicit adaptation options that helps adjust the way land use planning can be done for a climate future. This framework can help identify critical landscape spaces to support thoughtful trade-off decisions about species and ecosystem protection with alternative human land uses. It arose from a synthesis effort by a working group comprised of conservation biologists, modelers, and policymakers charged with developing practical guidance for integrating climate adaptation approaches. The resulting framework crosses three ecological scales (i.e., species, ecosystems, and landscapes) used in different levels of planning with six adaptation approaches. These approaches were selected because they are spatially explicit and complementary, and resemble natural adaptation processes that encourage landscape resiliency. They range from leveraging areas already dedicated to conserving species and ecosystems to approaches that anticipate and connect locations of future species assemblages across the landscape.
Maintaining and restoring ecological connectivity is a cornerstone adaptation approach in the Framework. For current conditions, this approach supplies guidance on identifying where species movement will likely take place across the landscape and accordingly identifies current and potential future travel routes and impediments to movement such as terrain, vegetation, human land use, and geological barriers. By drawing upon a wide range of connectivity tools, the connectivity adaptation approach guides practitioners to create permeable landscapes with corridors, stepping stones, or working lands to sustain gene flow and facilitate recolonization after local extinction. As climate change induces species range shifts, this guidance will facilitate conservation on a dynamic landscape by anticipating where species will move, and connecting these new areas with corridors. The connectivity adaption approaches are also strongly linked to the other adaptation approaches (e.g., ensuring species can reach refugia and examining how biodiversity’s migrations are influenced by geophysical settings).
The framework is also designed to produce maps as a visual expression of different ecological scales. This spatially explicit tactic is a critical component for connectivity. Maps help practitioners identify how local planning efforts will create or have created barriers to species migrations and thereby facilitates coordinated redesigning of the landscapes. Furthermore, considering the broader landscape context, and partnering with the complementary agency, the connectivity adaption approaches emphasizes the importance of integrating conservation efforts at multiple ecological scales to ensure long-term, broad scale species viability and ecosystem resilience.
The Framework is intentionally not prescriptive, but rather is a synthetic effort that was designed to provide guidance for conservation practitioners to help reconcile protecting ecosystems services with other compatible land uses for infrastructure development. To begin, choose one or more adaptation strategy(ies) (the left column of the matrix) and level(s) of ecological organization may be appropriate depending on conservation planning goals. Next, choose the appropriate analysis tools, data sets and time horizons for the analysis within the selected cell(s). After completing analysis for the suite of appropriate cells, the Framework provides a systematic way to deliberately consider how the different adaptation approaches and ecological levels may complement each other spatially.
