Abstract
Climate change will pose increasingly significant challenges to managers of parks and other forms of protected areas around the world. Over the past two decades, numerous scientific publications have identified potential adaptations, but their suitability from legal, policy, financial, internal capacity, and other management perspectives has not been evaluated for any protected area agency or organization. In this study, a panel of protected area experts applied a Policy Delphi methodology to identify and evaluate climate change adaptation options across the primary management areas of a protected area agency in Canada. The panel identified and evaluated one hundred and sixty five (165) adaptation options for their perceived desirability and feasibility. While the results revealed a high level of agreement with respect to the desirability of adaptation options and a moderate level of capacity pertaining to policy formulation and management direction, a perception of low capacity for implementation in most other program areas was identified. A separate panel of senior park agency decision-makers used a multiple criterion decision-facilitation matrix to further evaluate the institutional feasibility of the 56 most desirable adaptation options identified by the initial expert panel and to prioritize them for consideration in a climate change action plan. Critically, only two of the 56 adaptation options evaluated by senior decision-makers were deemed definitely implementable, due largely to fiscal and internal capacity limitations. These challenges are common to protected area agencies in developed countries and pervade those in developing countries, revealing that limited adaptive capacity represents a substantive barrier to biodiversity conservation and other protected area management objectives in an era of rapid climate change.
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Acknowledgments
This research would have not been completed without the gracious support of Barton Feilders, Rob Davis, and Bob Davidson (Ontario Parks), Paul Gray (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources), Tom Beechey (Canadian Council on Ecological Areas), David Welch (formerly Parks Canada Agency), Stephen Murphy (Centre for Applied Science in Ontario Protected Areas, University of Waterloo) and Fulbright Canada (Michael Hawes, Fulbright Canada Secretariat; Chris Kirkey, Centre for the Study of Canada, SUNY-Plattsburgh; and, Jill Baron, U.S. Geological Survey, Colorado State University). We thank Jill Baron, David Graber (U.S. National Park Service) and two reviewers for their insightful comments that improved the manuscript. Thanks also to Rob de Loë (Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo) for providing important guidance pertaining to the research. The authors would like to offer a most sincere thanks to all those who participated in the Policy Delphi surveys—this study would have not been possible without their participation. Thank you all for your tremendous contributions. Finally, this study would have not been completed without financial support from Natural Resources Canada (Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Program, Project #: A1393), Fulbright Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Ontario Parks or the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
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Lemieux, C.J., Scott, D.J. Changing Climate, Challenging Choices: Identifying and Evaluating Climate Change Adaptation Options for Protected Areas Management in Ontario, Canada. Environmental Management 48, 675–690 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-011-9700-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-011-9700-x