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Katherine R Clifford

Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing unprecedented and lasting change, a new management paradigm is forming, supported by a decision-oriented framework that presents three distinct management choices: resist, accept, or direct the ecological trajectory. To make these choices strategically, managers seek to understand the nature of the transformation that could occur if change is accepted while identifying opportunities to intervene to resist or direct change. In this article, we seek to inspire a research agenda...
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Drought is a complex environmental hazard that impacts both ecological and social systems. Accounting for the role of human attitudes, institutions, and societal values in drought planning is important to help identify how various drought durations and severity may differentially affect social resilience to adequately respond to and manage drought impacts. While there have been successful past efforts to understand how individuals, communities, institutions, and agencies plan for and respond to drought, these studies have relied on extensive multi-year case studies in specific locations. In contrast, this project seeks to determine how social science insights and methods can best contribute to ecological drought...
Ecological transformation creates many challenges for public natural resource management and requires managers to grapple with new relationships to change and new ways to manage it. In the context of unfamiliar trajectories of ecological change, a manager can resist, accept, or direct change, choices that make up the resist-accept-direct (RAD) framework. In this article, we provide a conceptual framework for how to think about this new decision space that managers must navigate. We identify internal factors (mental models) and external factors (social feasibility, institutional context, and scientific uncertainty) that shape management decisions. We then apply this conceptual framework to the RAD strategies (resist,...
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This guide is intended to provide managers, decision makers, and other practitioners with advice on conducting a rapid assessment of the social dimensions of drought. Findings from a rapid assessment can provide key social context that may aid in decision making, such as when preparing a drought plan, allocating local drought resilience funding, or gathering the support of local agencies and organizations for collective action related to drought mitigation. Part I—In the introduction to Part I, we describe the unique problems associated with drought—particularly its slow onset and long duration, which make it difficult to define drought—and highlight five major types of drought (see Box 1). We introduce a few social...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Despite striking global change, management to ensure healthy landscapes and sustained natural resources has tended to set objectives on the basis of the historical range of variability in stationary ecosystems. Many social–ecological systems are moving into novel conditions that can result in ecological transformation. We present four foundations to enable a transition to future-oriented conservation and management that increases capacity to manage change. The foundations are to identify plausible social–ecological trajectories, to apply upstream and deliberate engagement and decision-making with stakeholders, to formulate management pathways to desired futures, and to consider a portfolio approach to manage risk...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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