Description

The Climate Change group has been working on developing guidance for integrating climate change into the Conservation Standards process.  

Lead by: Marcia Brown (FOS), John Morrison (WWF) &  Varsha Suresh (FOS)

Other members: Nico Boenisch, Tobias Garstecki, Adrienne Marvin, Ryan Mitchell

Climate change is increasingly threatening ecosystems, species, and the people who depend on them.  Guidance for practicing climate adaptation has advanced considerably in the last 20 years. While it is rightly suggested that climate considerations should be included in human and conservation planning from the outset, guidance and funding is frequently restricted to “climate adaptation” as a separate activity. The result is a lack of support for practitioners to fully integrate climate into general planning.

To help fill this gap, the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Climate Guidance Working Group has collaborated with the project “Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) in High Mountainous Regions of Central Asia” of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH to develop two guidance documents: Conservation Standards Applied to Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Climate-Smart Conservation Practice. These guides build on the widely used Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation, and while both incorporate examples from Central Asia, they are aimed at a global audience of EbA and biodiversity conservation practitioners, as well as protected area managers.

The Conservation Standards Applied to Ecosystem-based Adaptation guide focuses on assessing how climate change may affect ecosystem-dependent human communities and using ecosystem conservation and restoration to maintain the resilience of those communities. Similarly, the Climate-Smart Conservation Practice guide focuses on assessing how climate change may affect focal ecosystems and species and on incorporating this knowledge into the broader assessment, design, implementation, monitoring, and adaptive management of conservation projects. 

Both guides help practitioners to:

• document the potential impacts of climate change on focal ecosystems and species, under different climate scenarios (i.e., conduct a climate vulnerability assessment)

• examine the relationships between climate change and conventional threats and drivers 

• consider various types of climate-smart strategies and incorporate climate vulnerability into the theory of change for these strategies 

• determine how to monitor and evaluate progress, to ensure adaptive management and ongoing learning 

Addressing the climate crisis requires integrating climate into all aspects of our work. As we do this, we should keep in mind the words of Albert Einstein: “In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.”

Over the last few years, as the CMP Climate Guidance Working Group has developed Climate-Smart Conservation Practice, a few organizations in the Conservation Standards community have applied different parts of the guidance. Several organizations have experimented with different approaches to incorporating climate change into their situation models and using these models to brainstorm climate adaptation strategies. A few have tried to conduct climate scenario planning. 

Webinar: Ecosystem-Based Adaptation with Cattle Ranchers in Mexico by Yven Echeverria (Recording, Slides & Other Resources)

The Climate Guidance Working Group has spent some time learning from their experiences through case studies development and learning group sessions. Here are the products that came from this initiative :

• Case Study 1 : Wildlife Conservation Society (Chile)

• Case Study 2 : Bush Heritage (Australia)

• Case Study 3 : Black-tailed Prarie Dog Restoration in Grasslands National Park (Canada) (forthcoming in 2022)

• Case Study 4 : United States Fish and Wildlife Service (Alaska, USA)

• Learning Session 1: Climate Smart Situation Models

• Learning Session 2: Scenario Planning