Scaling Climate Change Adaptation in the Northern Great Plains through Regional Climate Summaries and Local Qualitative-quantitative Scenario Planning Workshops

Abstract:

This presentation will describe a project to between ecologists and climate scientists to inform National Park Service managers who are developing scenario planning for their parks and surrounding areas; this effort is advancing scenario methodologies and improving delivery mechanisms and applications to decision-making for National Parks.

Climate change is expressed in both regional climatic shifts (e.g., temperature and precipitation changes) and local resource impacts. Resource management in a changing climate is challenging because future climate change and resource responses cannot be precisely predicted. Scenario planning is a tool to assess the range of plausible future conditions. However, selecting, acquiring, synthesizing, and scaling climate information for scenario planning requires significant time and skills. This project, which was recently selected for funding by the NC CSC, has three goals: 1) synthesize climate data into 3-5 distinctly different but plausible climate summaries for the northern Great Plains region; 2) craft summaries of these climate futures that are relevant to local land management units; and 3) apply these local summaries to further develop quantitative climate-resource-management scenarios through participatory workshops and simulation models. We will engage multiple stakeholders in two focal areas within the region: southwestern South Dakota in the vicinity of Badlands National Park, and central North Dakota in the vicinity of Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. This effort will increase climate change planning efficiency in the region; promote collaborations across jurisdictions; and develop a prototype for a novel, efficient, and replicable form of scenario planning that could serve additional management units.