Adaptation Planning
Why Adaptation?
Adaptation can minimize the impacts of climate change at the local level. Actions can cool environments, reduce flooding, and proactively address the impacts of sea level rise. The core of adaptation is that the choices made now are based on climate projections and specific vulnerabilities, and designed to function under the climate of the future. Over the long term, money and resources can be saved by forward planning in infrastructure and management that’s suited to a changing climate, rather than having it be outdated and undersized very quickly.
The most comprehensive approach is preparing a plan that looks at all aspects of climate mitigation and adaptation and then identifies all the other plans and regulations that need to change to implement the climate action plan. The goals and values, climate projections, community wide vulnerability, proposed steps, and implementation and monitoring that are included in this climate action plan can then be taken up in other plans. This comprehensive approach allows you to consider both reducing greenhouse gasses (mitigation) and preparing for future climate (adaptation) together, which can be beneficial to be sure that you are not proposing options that harm one or the other (maladaptation).
Here are some climate-informed decision support tools to help you categorize actions or desired ecosystem states.
Decision support tools
Witness, Acknowledge, Mend, Protect, Unite, Move (WAMPUM)
Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework
Resistance Resilience Transformation (RRT)
Portfolio planning
Climate change scenario planning
Structured Decision Making (SDM)
Conservation Standards Workbook
What, when, where, why, and who (5Ws)
Nature Futures Framework (NFF)
More Adaptations can be found here
