Towards a climate change adaptation strategy for national parks

Cave in bushland around Sydney, Australia

This collaboration developed a participatory adaptation planning process to assess the various types of risk currently being managed in each of the seven functional areas of National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) and how risks would escalate under climate change. The information generated from the project established a credible evidence base for both planning and implementing of adaptation responses for NPWS.

Eighteen intensive workshops were conducted with staff from NPWS. These workshops gathered information on the broad suite of options available to each of the seven functional areas to manage the impacts of a changing climate within protected areas in NSW, as well as key park values (such as priority species, built-heritage assets, sites of cultural importance or rare landscape features or ecosystems) at risk from a changing climate, the current level of risk to these park values, and identified the range of management actions that could be implemented to protect those values.

This research contributed to the NPWS Adaptation Strategy that included triggers into the Asset Management System to operationalise adaptation decision-making; development of a comprehensive communications strategy for communicating adaptation decisions of NPWS to the NSW community; and the support of Aboriginal Heritage risk management through delivering adaptation workshops to Aboriginal Custodian Groups of Joint Managed Parks. The project focused on how climate variability and extreme events would impact the management of national parks then and into the future. It explored how the different functional areas in parks interconnect. It assessed the various types of risk that were being managed in each functional area and how risks will escalate under climate change. The information generated from the project provided a credible evidence base for both planning and implementing adaptation responses for Parks.

RESEARCH OUTPUTS

Application of risk-based, adaptive pathways to climate adaptation planning for public conservation areas in NSW, Australia (2019) (Report)
Climate, 7(4) p.58

Towards a climate change adaptation strategy for national parks: Adaptive management pathways under dynamic risk (2018) (Report)
Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 89, pp. 206-215.