Final Memo for Structured decision-making to facilitate multi-stakeholder coastal conservation and restoration under climate change uncertainties: case study on barrier islands of the northern Gulf of Mexico

Acquisition Date

2015-12-01 14:05:00

Barrier island resource managers within the northern Gulf of Mexico need to more directly incorporate scientific uncertainties and technological challenges inherent with large-scale barrier island restoration projects, and as such, have committed to developing a robust long-term monitoring program and applying adaptive management. These managers want to determine project success in accordance with stated project objectives, and also address critical uncertainties that would inform future decisions on design templates and island performance. They are looking for a process that can help develop adaptive management actions and tools to guide adaptive decision-making within the context of project construction, maintenance, and future prioritization of conservation actions. SDM is a collaborative process that includes stakeholders and scientists to define management objectives, alternative actions, external drivers, predictive models, and quantitative methods for optimization and tradeoff analysis to identify optimal decisions and key uncertainties to be addressed through further gathering of information (Conroy and Peterson 2012 and Gregory et al., 2012). Under the MsCIP program, SDM was applied to the Barrier Island Restoration on Ship Island to provide a formal, transparent and replicable process for analyzing decisions about repairing storm-related damages that may arise during island construction to help support their existing AM program. The original objective of the project was to use SDM for developing a shared conservation framework and vision of comprehensive barrier island restoration planning, implementation, and assessment in the face of climate change within the northern Gulf of Mexico, using the MsCIP Barrier Island Restoration at Ship Island as a case study. A decision tool tied to various future barrier island system conditions associated with estimating sand loss volumes and costs of repair was designed for the MsCIP to ensure management decisions optimize the sustainability of the constructed barrier island project while also accounting for stakeholder input and uncertainty about future system change (i.e. potential storm related damages). This process established a framework to make defensible, transparent, efficient and coordinated decisions to optimize barrier island restoration at Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico. The developed framework provided a template that could be expanded and carried forward providing opportunities to refine to specific adaptive management needs for other projects and programs in the future. During the development of the proposal the original intent was to use the MsCIP as a case study for development of a prototype decision making tool for barrier island restoration and conservation in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Once developed, other regional program managers would be engaged to refine and adapt the draft decision framework to broaden its applicability beyond Mississippi to barrier island restoration and conservation throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico. It was not known however when scoping the project the level of detail that would be necessary to provide a ready to use decision model. After development of the first prototype it was determined by the stakeholder team that it would be more beneficial to the resource community and the MsCIP to add additional detail to the decision tool to create a very detailed ready to use product that could guide decisions related to barrier island construction rather than engage regional program managers in a general framework.

• National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers
• Southeast CASC