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Managing Under Uncertainty
Citation:
Hoffman, J., E. Rowland, C. Hawkins Hoffman, J. West, S. Julius, AND M. Hayes. Managing Under Uncertainty. Chapter 12, Stein, B.A., P. Glick, N. Edelson, and A. Staudt (ed.), Climate-Smart Conservation: Putting Adaptation Principles into Practice. National Wildlife Federation, Reston, VA, , 177-188, (2014).
Impact/Purpose:
Climate change already is having significant impacts on the nation’s species and ecosystems, and these effects are projected to increase considerably over time. As a result, climate change is now a primary lens through which conservation and natural resource management must be viewed. How should we prepare for and respond to the impacts of climate change on wildlife and their habitats? What should we be doing differently in light of these climatic shifts, and what actions continue to make sense? Climate-Smart Conservation: Putting Adaptation Principles into Practice offers guidance for designing and carrying out conservation in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
Description:
Managers commonly cite uncertainty as a major obstacle to planning and decision-making in the face of climate change, and some claim that the deep uncertainty around climate change makes it different from other issues faced by the conservation and resource management community (e.g., Ranger 2011). The reality is that our world is rife with uncertainty, and the uncertainty surrounding climate change is not the only or necessarily the largest source of uncertainty for many aspects of management decisions. Whether explicit or in the background, uncertainty is a daily presence for conservation practitioners. That said, uncertainty related to climate change is a very real issue, and asking the “climate question” means dealing with uncertainty. Most of the key characteristics of climate-smart conservation directly or indirectly incorporate uncertainty, and uncertainty comes in at virtually every stage of the climate-smart cycle (Figure 4.1). Although approaches for addressing uncertainty are referenced at many points in this document, because it is such an overarching concern this chapter addresses the issue and discusses approaches in a single, coherent chapter that applies to the entire climate-smart process. In light of the pervasive nature of uncertainty, it is no surprise that theory, guidance, and tools for assessing, understanding, and incorporating uncertainty into decision-making occur in a wide range of fields (e.g., Polasky et al. 2011). A growing literature explores this issue specifically as regards climate change adaptation (e.g., Lempert et al. 2003, Dessai and van der Sluijs 2007, Reeder and Ranger 2011), with some authors arguing that existing approaches to managing in the face of uncertainty (e.g., adaptive management) are sufficient for working with climate-related uncertainty (e.g., Nichols et al. 2011). The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad-brush introduction to the field, a conceptual framework to help managers and policy-makers get their minds around it, and an introduction to several tools that can help make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
