Scenarios are used in climate change research to explore potential impacts, assess vulnerability, and identify adaptation options. In developing scenarios, however, there is a challenge in moving ...between global, national, and local scales in a way that connects complex adaptive systems in meaningful ways for stakeholders. Some emulate the global parallel scenario framework of Representative Concentration Pathways, Shared Socio-economic Pathways, and Shared Policy Assumptions, collecting and refining expert data and projections into relatively complex scenarios for specific regions. However, such approaches can be expensive, time-consuming, and privilege expert biophysical knowledge. Others use participatory approaches, working with local people to co-create scenarios based on experiential knowledge, risk perception, and community aspirations. While useful, these highly localized scenarios are often unable to account for linkages and feedbacks between national and international processes. Here we seek to overcome some of these challenges through a combination of elements from the global scenario architecture, and locally specific data that bridge a range of social issues, including political debates, land use, and socio-economic inequalities. We illustrate the approach through a case study of the West Coast, New Zealand, which shows that meaningful climate change scenarios that are credible, legitimate, and relevant can be used to open up material discussions. Our methodology provides a robust process that connects international best practice to local contexts and communicates climate change scenarios through accessible textual and visual boundary objects. The results provide a basis for further process refinement and application elsewhere, highlighting key methodological challenges and opportunities.
The parallel scenario process provides a framework for developing plausible scenarios of future conditions. Combining greenhouse gas emissions, social and economic trends, and policy responses, it ...enables researchers and policy makers to consider global-scale interactions, impacts and implications of climate change. Increasingly, researchers are developing extended scenarios, based on this framework, and incorporating them into adaptation planning and decision-making processes at the local level. To enable the identification of possible impacts and assess vulnerability, these local-parallel scenarios must successfully accommodate diverse knowledge systems, multiple values, and competing priorities including both “top down” modeling and “bottom-up” participatory processes. They must link across scales, to account for the ways in which global changes affect and influence decision-making in local places. Due to the growing use of scenarios, there is value in assessing these developments using criteria or, more specifically, heuristics that may be implicitly acknowledged rather than formally monitored and evaluated. In this Perspective, we reflect on various contributions regarding the value of heuristics and propose the adoption of current definitions for Relevance, Credibility, and Legitimacy for guiding local scenario development as the most useful as well as using Effectiveness for evaluation purposes. We summarize the internal trade-offs (personal time, clarity-complexity, speed-quality, push-pull) and the external stressors (equity and the role of science in society) that influence the extent to which heuristics are used as “rules of thumb,” rather than formal assessment. These heuristics may help refine the process of extending the parallel scenario framework to the local and enable cross-case comparisons.
Flood damage assessments provide critical information for flood hazard mitigation under changing climate conditions. Recent efforts to improve and systemise damage assessments have focused primarily ...on urban environments with few examples for primary industries such as dairy. This paper explores the adverse consequences of flooding on dairy farms in the Bay of Plenty region, New Zealand. Ex-tropical Cyclone Debbie in April 2017 caused prolonged riverine and surface water flooding on over 3500 hectares of dairy farmland. The event provided an opportunity to develop and apply a participatory approach for collecting information about on-farm flood damage, and both response and recovery actions implemented by dairy farmers. Semi-structured interviews and transect walks with farmers revealed a range of direct and indirect damages to production and capital assets, influenced by duration of inundation, silt deposition and seasonality. Results highlight the need to identify on-farm and off-farm asset interdependencies of dairy farm systems to estimate long-term socio-economic consequences at farm-level. Enhancing dairy farm flood resilience in a changing climate will rely on farm-level response and recovery plans, proactively supported by emergency management agencies, farm service suppliers and support agencies.
Adaptation pathways is an approach to identify, assess, and sequence climate change adaptation options over time, linking decisions to critical signals and triggers derived from scenarios of future ...conditions. However, conceptual differences in their development can hinder methodological advance and create a disconnect between those applying pathways approaches and the wider community of practitioners undertaking vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessments. Here, we contribute to close these gaps, advancing principles, and processes that may be used to guide the trajectory for adaptation pathways, without having to rely on data-rich or resource-intensive methods. To achieve this, concepts and practices from the broad pathways literature is combined with our own experience in developing adaptation pathways for primary industries facing the combined impacts of climate change and other, nonclimatic stressors. Each stage is guided by a goal and tools to facilitate discussions and produce feasible pathways. We illustrate the process with a case study from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, involving multiple data sources and methods in two catchments. Resulting guidelines and empirical examples are consistent with principles of adaptive management and planning and can provide a template for developing local-, regional- or issue-specific pathways elsewhere and enrich the diversity of vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation assessment practice.
•Climate change will have significant effects for primary industries.•Fundamental and applied knowledge is urgently needed to support adaptation.•Reviews state of adaptation science for Aotearoa-New ...Zealand primary industries.•Novel typology applied to distinguish Impacts, Implications, Decisions and Actions.•Provides template for application in diverse contexts and adaptation domains.
Climate sensitive primary industries including pastoral farming, high-value horticulture and viticulture are central to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s economy. While advances have been made in understanding the impacts and implications of climate change critical knowledge gaps remain, particularly for adaptation. This study develops and applies a novel methodology to identify and characterise adaptation knowledge for primary industries. The basis for the review is ten years’ of research and action under the Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change (SLMACC) program, supplemented with a systematic review of the published literature. Reports (n = 32) and literature (n = 22) are reviewed and assessed using the Adaptation Knowledge Cycle to characterise analytical and empirical foci. The detailed assessment of knowledge for Impacts, Implications, Decisions or Actions enables a robust and rigorous assessment of existing knowledge, identifies critical research gaps and emerging needs. Results show research to date has focused almost exclusively on understanding the impact of climate variability and extremes on land management. There are significant empirical (e.g. location and sector) and methodological (e.g. integrated assessments, scenarios, and vulnerability assessment) gaps, for at risk regions and sectors, and limited understanding of the decisions and actions necessary to enable successful adaptation. To inform future adaptation planning, additional work is required to better understand the implications, decision-making processes and obstacles to action. More detailed understanding of location-, season-, time- and sector-specific responses to climate change is also necessary. Findings advance our understanding of adaptation knowledge and reflect on diversity of information necessary to enable and sustain resilient rural futures and provide a conceptual and methodological basis for similar assessments elsewhere.
•Adaptation pathways can support planning for place- and problem-based issues.•Credible, relevant, and legitimate essential, though imperfect, evaluation criteria.•Addressing complex risks ...demonstrates value of science at local policy interface.•Ability to work with and embrace messiness and complexity is required.•Participatory processes provide essential engagement and capacity building.
‘Think global, act local’ has been linked with climate change issues for several decades and suggests a simple downscaling of ideas, tools and processes can be relatively easily achieved. Adaptation pathways, for example, are increasingly used to identify and evaluate adaptation options against a range of plausible futures. The process is applied to both large-scale infrastructure and investment decisions, as well as smaller-scale, sub-national issues associated in part, with climate change impacts and implications. Consequently, pathways are being developed in the context of multiple contested values, competing with other, more immediate, non-climate-related or indirectly related planning processes, such as freshwater management, community resilience and wellbeing, and biodiversity conservation. In this Short Communication we reflect specifically on place-based adaptation pathways constructed, presented, and implemented within limited budgets and without recourse to resource-intensive research capacities. We emphasise the need to meet criteria for local credibility, legitimacy, and relevance. Specifically, we suggest there is a need to accommodate the complexities of local conditions; establish affordable and accessible processes; and build technical and participatory capability. These considerations may assist with co-creating place-based pathways and incorporate a wider range of complex issues both political and contextual with multiple constituencies including, as necessary, where science itself is increasingly questioned or disregarded. In turn this might lead to sets of country specific, nested local hierarchical adaptation options developed through pluralist approaches.
•Risks and challenges for the international wine industry are increasingly complex.•Novel socio-ecological resilience framework applied to assess characteristics of resilience in the wine ...industry.•Assessment empirically applied to recent earthquake in Marlborough wine region (New Zealand).•Critical vulnerabilities and opportunities to enhance resilience identified.•Provides the basis for further conceptual development of resilience assessment.
This paper examines resilience through a case study of New Zealand’s largest wine region following a damaging earthquake in late-2016. Resilience assessment for the wine industry to date has largely focused on characterising risks and responses as a function of organisational and business management practices. Less in known about socio-ecological characteristics of resilience and how these shape and influence response capabilities and capacity to low-frequency, high-magnitude events within the broader context of other risks. The research employs a resilience-based framework to identify and assess relevant properties incorporating a whole-of-value-chain perspective. The participatory approach includes semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, including wine business managers, wine researchers, industry bodies and others involved in the production and distribution of wine; document analysis (media and emergency response reports), and insurance assessments. Results show the earthquake had direct impacts on infrastructure, with indirect impacts and implications in particular for transportation and logistics, affecting the industry’s ability to mitigate losses. Resilience varies across the region and the industry, in part as a function of size, scale, and ownership structure of the operation, which in turn influences future levels of preparedness. Resilience analysis provides conceptual and methodological tools for assessing the capacity of socio-ecological systems to recover from shocks and stresses. The framework developed here provides a useful conceptual and theoretical basis for further assessments and can inform the design of resilience indices to monitor organisations’ capacity to absorb shocks and prepare for future uncertainty. This type of analysis can help identify system-critical vulnerabilities and sensitivities and inform the development of strategies to develop specified and general resilience in the face of multiple stressors.
The impacts and implications of climate change – such as floods, droughts, heavy rainfall and increased regulation – are affecting dairy farming practices in the lower South Island (Te Waipaounamu) ...of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Adapting to these changes, in an equitable and transformational manner, is dependent on understanding the underlying root causes of vulnerability alongside local knowledge and values. We apply an intersectional values-based and contextual analysis to describe how past and present processes of agrarian change interact across different farmer identities to influence adaptive pathways. Local knowledge, place-based experience, values and perceptions of fairness intersect with different facets of a farmer's identity – such as financial capacity, land ownership status, debt arrangements, age and gendered participation – to enable or constrain adaptive action. Notably, notions of fairness, whether real or perceived, vary across farmer groups, and influence the kinds of adaptation activities that dairy farmers are willing, or potentially able, to engage in. The results call for more contextualised engagement with farming communities, and highlight the need to build a shared understanding of the complex historical, social, economic, cultural and environmental drivers of past, present and future change, in this highly productive, yet risky, agricultural landscape.
•Intersectional values-based and contextual analyses help identify the barriers and enablers to transformational climate change adaptation in dairy farming contexts.•Dairy farmers' adaptive capacity is socially and economically differentiated, and influenced by experience, values and perceptions of fairness.•Greater contextualised engagement with dairy farmers is needed, without undermining environmental and greenhouse gas reforms.
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