A Systematic Approach to Incorporate the Human Response into Climate Change Conservation Planning – summary report
For the past three years ABCG members Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, and World Wildlife Fund have collaborated to bridge existing knowledge gaps in adaption. Building on the work conducted by the group in recent years where activities highlighted the central role that human livelihoods played in the conservation adaptation work that all member organizations were engaged in, the activities in 2013 focused on the integration of the human response to climate change into conservation vulnerability assessments. Conservation vulnerability assessments often focus only on the direct impact of climate change on biodiversity (e.g. range shift in response to higher temperatures or altered rainfall regimes). This narrow focus means that we may only be partially accounting for the true impact of climate change. Human populations are also responding to climate change and will continue to respond to reduce their vulnerability and take advantage of new opportunities that climate change creates. The impact these changes in human behavior have on biodiversity are the “indirect impacts” of climate change, and understanding them is essential to identifying effective and appropriate conservation interventions. The goal of the work is to mainstream the incorporation of the human response to climate change into conservation climate adaptation planning through worked examples.