The Cape Romain Coastal Conservation Partnership: multi-decision-maker adaptation planning for global change along the U.S. Atlantic coast

Abstract:

Coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S. have been severely altered by local and regional processes associated with human development, wetland drainage, hydrologic alterations, and other forms of land-use change. Compounding these impacts are global-scale ecological changes such as sea-level rise, extreme precipitation, drought, and storm frequency. Early USFWS–USGS discussions established that the ability of local organizations to meet their mission objectives (e.g., through management authority, financial resources) are often mismatched with the scale of global change affecting valued resources. The limited agency by which an organization is able to guide its future can be remedied either by re-aligning its goals or by expanding opportunities through partnering with other entities and decision makers to respond collectively to anticipated drivers of changes. Reframing an adaptation problem for a coastal wildlife refuge, we formed a partnership to engage local socio-environmental NGOs and state and federal resource agencies operating in South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry in developing and testing adaptation planning strategies. Our focus was on process over product, with a goal of assisting partners to develop methods for collaborative learning and a social engagement process of long-term, landscape-scale adaptation planning to address uncertainty in future biophysical and socio-economic conditions. Our approach focused on: 1) engaging stakeholders to understand perceptions of climate change, planning preparedness, and imagined futures at local, regional and national scales; 2) documenting impacts associated with land-use, climate and social change to develop future scenarios; 3) evaluating the provision of, and changes to ecosystem services to inform land protection strategies; and 4) developing methods and approaches for partners to maintain and enhance collaborations, leverage mechanisms for experiential feedback, and promote social learning to aid collective decision making and enhanced adaptive capacity. Eventual success of these efforts is predicated on the understanding that generating practical solutions to complex problems will ultimately rely on local actors engaging, co-developing, and implementing their own collective vision for the social-ecological landscape.