Climate Adaptation Workshop

Target Audience:

Natural resource managers and conservation professionals interested in incorporating climate information into their planning and conservation efforts, including conservation practitioners and planners and natural resource managers working at multiple scales to ensure the ongoing effectiveness of their work in an era of climate change climate change
Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.

Learn more about climate change .

Summary and Objectives:

This course provides hands-on training for applying climate-smart principles to real natural resource management plans and projects that are local or regional in scope. The training and coaching session is based on the guide Climate-Smart Conservation: Putting Adaptation Principles into Practice. Teams, consisting of three or more people, will be coached using the climate-smart conservation framework and will develop climate-informed conservation goals and integrate adaption planning into ongoing work. Teams will document their project at the end of the workshop with a short summary.

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify climate change impacts that pose the greatest challenges and opportunities for meeting current goals and achieving existing actions.
• Evaluate project conservation goals from a climate change perspective, identify where existing goals may be compromised by projected climate impacts, and explore modifications needed to craft climate-informed goals.
• Identify a range of possible adaptation options based on vulnerability information and other management considerations.
• Evaluate adaptation options from multiple perspectives, including their ability to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience.
• Design an adaptation planning process that aims to address the effects of climate change on a target (focal) species or ecosystem.
• Tell a clear and compelling story of how their conservation project is designed to achieve climate adaptation outcomes.

Competency Addressed:

Planning for Uncertainty - Intermediate, Vulnerabilities Assessment - Intermediate, Climate Science - Intermediate, Climate Change Adaptation - Intermediate