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This report explains scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool in general, then describes how it was applied to Wind Cave National Park as the second part of a pilot project to dovetail climate change scenario planning with National Park Service (NPS) Resource Stewardship Strategy development. In the orientation phase, Park and regional NPS staff, other subject-matter experts, natural and cultural resource planners, and the climate change core team who led the scenario planning project identified priority resource management topics and associated climate sensitivities. Next, the climate change core team used this information to create a set of four divergent climate futures—summaries of relevant climate...
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Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible future climates that could occur at a specific place and time. Divergent climate futures that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions support information needs of decision makers, including understanding the spectrum of potential resource responses to climate change, developing strategies robust to...
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The impacts of climate change (CC) on natural and cultural resources are far-reaching and complex. A major challenge facing resource managers is not knowing the exact timing and nature of those impacts. To confront this problem, scientists, adaptation specialists, and resource managers have begun to use scenario planning (SP). This structured process identifies a small set of scenarios—descriptions of potential future conditions that encompass the range of critical uncertainties—and uses them to inform planning. We reflect on a series of five recent participatory CC SP projects at four US National Park Service units and derive guidelines for using CC SP to support natural and cultural resource conservation. Specifically,...
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This report presents climate change-informed resource stewardship strategies for diverse Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve natural and cultural resources. The strategies were developed in early 2022 by park staff and other subject-matter experts in a scenario-based climate change adaptation planning process. Strategy development was facilitated by National Park Service (NPS) climate change adaptation specialists. Strategies address critical climate change implications for park resources identified in an immediately preceding (fall-2021) climate-resource scenario development process. The overall, nearly-year-long scenario- and strategy-development process was entirely virtual due
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This "In Brief" article describes the use of scenario planning to facilitate climate change adaptation in the National Park Service. It summarizes best practices and innovations for using climate change scenario planning, with an emphasis on management outcomes and manager perspectives. The scenario planning approach and management outcomes highlighted in this article are the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between the USGS and the National Park Service.
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