Final Report: Foundational Science Area: Maximizing Stakeholder Engagement to Support Climate Adaptation in the North Central U.S.
Dates
Publication Date
2020-01-20
Citation
Ojima, D., McNeeley, S., Lackett, J., 2020, Foundational Science Area: Maximizing Stakeholder Engagement to Support Climate
Adaptation in the North Central U.S., NC CASC FY 2017 FSA3-Adaptation: Sustaining Stakeholder
Engagement and Evaluation
Summary
Public Summary: The NC CASC has established collaborations across DOI agencies, other federal partners, and tribal communities in the north central United States. These collaborations were driven by stakeholder needs to help managers and user respond to and prepare for the impact of climate change to the resources that they manage. Our main goal here was to enhance the collaborative engagement process to facilitate the development of research that informs climate change adaptation planning. We did this by establishing, in collaboration with tribal representatives, guidelines for tribal engagement and supported a number of tribal entities interested in vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning. We also supported regional drought [...]
Summary
Public Summary: The NC CASC has established collaborations across DOI agencies, other federal partners, and tribal communities in the north central United States. These collaborations were driven by stakeholder needs to help managers and user respond to and prepare for the impact of climate change to the resources that they manage. Our main goal here was to enhance the collaborative engagement process to facilitate the development of research that informs climate change adaptation planning. We did this by establishing, in collaboration with tribal representatives, guidelines for tribal engagement and supported a number of tribal entities interested in vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning. We also supported regional drought synthesis work with multiple drought researchers, where we identified the types and scales of drought decision-making on public and tribal lands and the obstacles that hindered drought responses. This was useful to identify needs for more regional, collaborative, and anticipatory drought management, as well as understanding local complexities of drought management with broader generalizations about how drought decisions are made in these contexts. We also led a collaborative social-ecological vulnerability assessment with a Colorado BLM field office to inform their assessment and planning efforts. This led to the development of a process and lessons learned for collaborating with BLM and other public land management agencies to produce locally-informed and relevant climate science, which we argue can provide a useful guide for natural resource managers and researchers looking to engage in collaborative projects with these entities on climate-related management issues. The evaluation of the impact and the approaches used by the NC CASC research team to meet stakeholders need and to transmit information from our research efforts concluded that efforts with early engagement provided useable information of diverse and up-to-date science and technology products. Management groups and decision makers developed greater familiarity with approaches codeveloped with research groups. Shortcomings included short duration of project cycles; lack of capacity to deal multiple issues or obje