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Sustainable Adaptation Planning for Cultural Heritage in Coastal Tourism Destinations Under Climate Change: A Mixed-Paradigm of Preservation and Conservation Optimization
Abstract
Fragmented guidance and unbalanced climate adaptation efforts for tangible and intangible cultural heritage are challenging the long-term sustainability of coastal tourism destinations. Conceptualizing and quantifying adaptation paradigms that optimize cultural heritage preservation from multi-faceted perspectives under fiscal constraints is highly prioritized by coastal tourism destinations. Informed by the Modern Portfolio Theory, this study developed, tested, and evaluated four adaptation paradigms using machine-learning approaches to optimize the historical significance, tangible, and intangible values of multi-type cultural heritage in Gulf Island National Seashore across a 30-year planning horizon under varying fiscal constraints. Results indicated that adaptation paradigms can provide transformative and flexible preservation portfolios to preserve tangible and intangible uses when facing degradation or loss from inadequate funding and intensifying climate threats. The mixed-paradigm framework optimizes preservation efforts between tangible and intangible cultural heritage quantitatively and can be generalized to coastal tourism destinations globally as a sustainable climate adaptation decision support tool.
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Coastal tourism is one of the most important segments of the tourism industry but is facing major impacts of climate change. In light of these impacts, the infrastructure enabling coastal tourism activities needs to be adapted. It is through the production of a space framework inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre that we will reveal how a tourism space is socially constructing its own adaptation process. Using a case study methodology, we will examine the case of the Magdalen Island Archipelago in Québec, Canada, and pinpoint the subcase of La Grave. The case study will show how tourism is adding value to land dynamics to justify major adaptation work on the shore in order to protect the capital accumulation capacities of the tourism space. These justifications are buttressed by discourses of heritage and economic impacts to validate proceeding with a form of spatial reordering that privileges certain spaces while potentially leaving out others.
Substantial climate change impacts threaten the persistence of cultural resources globally. The need exists for conceptualizing decision support tools that focus on quantifying and optimizing the managerial priorities to leverage historic preservation and adaptation actions that enhance the continuity of heritage values and sites. Informed by the Structured Decision Making (SDM) approach, this study advances the singular objective Optimal Preservation (OptiPres) Model, a decision support tool for climate adaptation planning of historic buildings by considering three tourism management objectives: (a) maximize accumulated resource value, (b) maximize cost-efficiency, and (c) minimize vulnerability. These objectives are tested under different budget scenarios using a 30-year planning horizon with a subset of buildings located in two historic districts of Cape Lookout National Seashore (CALO), United States. The multi-objective approach demonstrates the OptiPres Model is trans-formative, transparent, and transferable for providing cultural resource decision support and enhancing the sustainability of cultural heritage globally.
Visitation to parks will change with increasing climate changes. We examined how place attachment may influence different types of climate-induced displacement at both the park and park system level. Previous research suggests that visitors who have greater place attachment to parks within a system may be more likely to tolerate changed environmental conditions before they are displaced from the system entirely or change their choice of park or time of visit within it. Our study, based on the Vermont State Parks system (U.S.), used an on-site visitor questionnaire to examine potential system, spatial, and temporal displacements resulting from ranges of five regionally specific probable manifestations of climate change. As hypothesized, we found that those with lower place attachment were more likely to be displaced. Specifically, these visitors would be more likely to shift their visitation to more southern and lower elevation parks to avoid increased rainfall, earlier/later in the season to avoid higher day or night time temperatures, and out of the park system entirely with more days above 90 F or biting insects. Our approach to examining climate change, place attachment, and displacement has relevance for considering how these three areas impact tourism and visitor use management, as well as utility for managers of these destinations.
The predicted increases in climate change vulnerability of heritage sites are alarming. Yet, heritage management focuses on enabling a steady state of heritage sites to ensure the continuity of values embedded within those properties. In this paper, we use the concept of resilience to demonstrate how expanding the heritage paradigm from solely a preservation perspective to one that also embraces a transformation perspective can accommodate for loss as well as promote learning. We argue that adaptation as currently conceptualized in the heritage field is limited, as it is not economically or ecologically feasible for all heritage sites or properties. When heritage properties are severely impacted by climatic events, we suggest that some remain damaged to serve as a memory of that event and the inherent vulnerabilities embedded in places. Moreover, when confronted with projected climatic impacts that exceed a financially viable threshold or ecological reality, or when rights holders or associated communities deem persistent adaptation unacceptable, we argue for transformation. We claim that transformation enables a reorganization of values focused on the discovery of future values embedded within changing associations and benefits. Therefore, we recommend that the heritage field adopts an alternative heritage policy that enables transformative continuity through applications of persistent and autonomous or anticipatory adaptation. We conclude by suggesting a pathway for such change at the international level; specifically, we call for the World Heritage Convention to develop a new grouping of sites, World Heritage Sites in Climatic Transformation.
Medieval fortresses represent an important tangible heritage of a nation’s culture and a valuable development asset for a particular destination on which its place-branding strategy for tourism could be built upon. Traditionally in Serbia, heritage protection and conservation have been mainly concentrated on the tangible aspects of cultural sites and monuments. Nevertheless, with the advent of urban heritage integration in the local sustainable development processes and place-branding strategies, a greater appreciation of the spirit of the place and its intangible components, as well as the need to adapt it to local contexts with more participatory forms of heritage planning, have started to emerge. A wide range of stakeholders brought the involvement and participation of both the local government and community members, including residents, as an indispensable element of the protection actions and broader urban development policies. The paper aims to validate the correlation between both intangible and tangible cultural heritage and its contemporary use for place branding and tourism development. In doing so, we have employed the case study method on the two fortresses on the Danube in Serbia to show the ways in which local stakeholders have mobilized their forces in cooperation with the university to use their cultural heritage assets for tourism and more extensive sustainable territorial development. We have found that despite new inclusive forms of governance, which is attracting the attention of planning and heritage practitioners in Serbia, the contemporary approach of integrative protection and the intangible aspects of cultural heritage are still not fully utilized. For this reason, in this study, we consider methods based on environmental aesthetics approaches to cultural heritage that point out the significant inclusion of immaterial intangible cultural heritage in an unbreakable bond with material tangible heritage. The most remarkable result of our research is that while a vast number of stakeholders with local knowledge and sense of the spirit of the place have been involved in the planning process, intangible aspects of the analyzed heritage cases are present in educational projects, and are only partially present if it comes to implementation. This clearly demonstrates that the focus on tangible aspects and spatial interventions of the place branding of cultural heritage is still dominant in Serbia, despite acknowledgment of the economic and social aspects of sustainability in the planning phase in educational projects.
Climate change increases not only the vulnerability of cultural resources, but also the cultural values that are deeply embedded in cultural resources and landscapes. As such, heritage managers are faced with imminent preservation challenges that necessitate the consideration of place meanings during adaptation planning. This study explores how stakeholders perceive the vulnerability of the tangible aspects of cultural heritage, and how climate change impacts and adaptation strategies may alter the meanings and values that are held within those resources. We conducted semi-structured interviews with individuals with known connections to the historic buildings located within cultural landscapes on the barrier islands of Cape Lookout National Seashore in the United States (US). Our findings revealed that community members hold deep place connections, and that their cultural resource values are heavily tied to the concepts of place attachment (place identity and place dependence). Interviews revealed a general acceptance of the inevitability of climate impacts and a transition of heritage meanings from tangible resources to intangible values. Our findings suggest that in the context of climate change, it is important to consider place meanings alongside physical considerations for the planning and management of vulnerable cultural resources, affirming the need to involve community members and their intangible values into the adaptive planning for cultural resources.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188142
The impact of changing climate on terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes can be examined through quantitatively-based analyses encompassing large data samples and broad geographic and temporal scales. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a multi-institutional collaboration that allows researchers online access to linked heritage data from multiple sources and data sets. The effects of sea-level rise and concomitant human population relocation is examined using a sample from nine states encompassing much of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the southeastern United States. A 1 m rise in sea-level will result in the loss of over >13,000 recorded historic and prehistoric archaeological sites, as well as over 1000 locations currently eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), encompassing archaeological sites, standing structures, and other cultural properties. These numbers increase substantially with each additional 1 m rise in sea level, with >32,000 archaeological sites and >2400 NRHP properties lost should a 5 m rise occur. Many more unrecorded archaeological and historic sites will also be lost as large areas of the landscape are flooded. The displacement of millions of people due to rising seas will cause additional impacts where these populations resettle. Sea level rise will thus result in the loss of much of the record of human habitation of the coastal margin in the Southeast within the next one to two centuries, and the numbers indicate the magnitude of the impact on the archaeological record globally. Construction of large linked data sets is essential to developing procedures for sampling, triage, and mitigation of these impacts.
Climate change challenges cultural heritage management and preservation. Understanding the barriers that can impede preservation is of paramount importance, as is developing solutions that facilitate the planning and management of vulnerable cultural resources. Using online survey research, we elicited the opinions of diverse experts across southeastern United States, a region with cultural resources that are particularly vulnerable to flooding and erosion from storms and sea level rise. We asked experts to identify the greatest challenges facing cultural heritage policy and practice from coastal climate change threats, and to identify strategies and information needs to overcome those challenges. Using content analysis, we identified institutional, technical and financial barriers and needs. Findings revealed that the most salient barriers included the lack of processes and preservation guidelines for planning and implementing climate adaptation actions, as well as inadequate funding and limited knowledge about the intersection of climate change and cultural heritage. Experts perceived that principal needs to overcome identified barriers included increased research on climate adaptation strategies and impacts to cultural heritage characteristics from adaptation, as well as collaboration among diverse multi-level actors. This study can be used to set cultural heritage policy and research agendas at local, state, regional and national scales.
Climate change poses serious threats to the protection and preservation of cultural heritage and resources. Despite a high level of scholarly interest in climate change impacts on natural and socio-economic systems, a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage and resources across various continents and disciplines is noticeably absent from the literature. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review methodology to identify and characterize the state of knowledge and how the cultural heritage and resources at risk from climate change are being explored globally. Results from 124 reviewed publications show that scholarly interest in the topic is increasing, employs a wide range of research methods, and represents diverse natural and social science disciplines. Despite such increasing and diverse interest in climate change and cultural heritage and resources, the geographic scope of research is limited (predominantly European focused). Additionally, we identified the need for future studies that not only focuses on efficient, sustainable adaptation planning options but also documents if, and how, the implementation of cultural heritage and resources adaptation or preservation is taking place. This systematic literature review can help direct scholarly research in climate change and cultural heritage and resource area. Ultimately, we hope these new directions can influence policy-making for preservation and adaptation of cultural heritage and cultural resources globally.
The stressors of global environmental change make it impossible over the long term for natural systems to maintain their historical composition. Conservation's new objective must be to maintain the building blocks of future systems (e.g., species, genes, soil types, and landforms) as they continuously rearrange. Because of the certainty of change, some biologists and managers question continued use of retrospective conservation strategies (e.g., reserves and restoration) informed by the historical range of variability. Prospective strategies that manage toward anticipated conditions have joined the conservation toolbox alongside retrospective conservation. We argue that high uncertainty around the rates and trajectories of climate and ecological change dictate the need to spread ecological risk using prospective and retrospective strategies across conservation networks in a systematic and adaptively managed approach. We term this a portfolio approach drawing comparisons to financial portfolio risk management as a means to maximize conservation benefit and learning. As with a financial portfolio, the portfolio approach requires that management allocations receive minimum temporal commitments to realize longer-term benefits. Our approach requires segregation of the strategies into three landscape zones to avoid counterproductive interactions. The zones will be managed to (1) observe change, (2) resist change, and (3) facilitate change. We offer guidelines for zone allocation based on ecological integrity. All zones should follow principles of conservation design traditionally applied to reserves. Comparable to financial portfolios, zone performance is monitored to facilitate learning and potential reallocation for long-term net minimization of risk to the building blocks of future ecosystems.
Hundreds of thousands of significant archaeological and cultural heritage sites (cultural sites) along the coasts of every continent are threatened by sea level rise, and many will be destroyed. This wealth of artefacts and monuments testifies to human history, cosmology and identity. While cultural sites are especially important to local and Indigenous communities, a stall in coordinated global action means adaptation at a local scale is often unsupported. In response, this paper produces a practical climate change risk analysis methodology designed for independent, community-scale management of cultural sites. It builds on existing methods that prioritise sites most at risk from climate impacts, proposing a field survey that integrates an assessment of the relative cultural value of sites with assessment of exposure and sensitivity to climate impacts. The field survey also stands as a monitoring program and complements an assessment of organisational adaptive capacity. The preliminary field survey was tested by Indigenous land managers in remote northern Australia at midden and rock art sites threatened by sea level rise, extreme flood events and a range of non-climactic hazards. A participatory action research methodology—incorporating planning workshops, semi-structured interviews and participant observations—gave rise to significant modifications to the preliminary field survey as well as management prioritisation of 120 sites. The field survey is anticipated to have global application, particularly among marginalised and remote Indigenous communities. Well-planned and informed participation, with community control, monitoring and well-informed actions, will contribute significantly to coordinated global and regional adaptation strategies.
Avoiding losses from climate change requires socially engaged research that explains what people value highly, how climate change imperils these phenomena, and strategies for embracing and managing grief.
Background
The present study reports results from the large-scale integrated EU project “Climate for Culture”. The full name, or title, of the project is Climate for Culture: damage risk assessment, economic impact and mitigation strategies for sustainable preservation of cultural heritage in times of climate change. This paper focusses on implementing high resolution regional climate models together with new building simulation tools in order to predict future outdoor and indoor climate conditions. The potential impact of gradual climate change on historic buildings and on the vast collections they contain has been assessed. Two moderate IPCC emission scenarios A1B and RCP 4.5 were used to predict indoor climates in historic buildings from the recent past until the year 2100. Risks to the building and to the interiors with valuable artifacts were assessed using damage functions. A set of generic building types based on data from existing buildings were used to transfer outdoor climate conditions to indoor conditions using high resolution climate projections for Europe and the Mediterranean.
Results
The high resolution climate change simulations have been performed with the regional climate model REMO over the whole of Europe including the Mediterranean region. Whole building simulation tools and a simplified building model were developed for historic buildings; they were forced with high resolution climate simulations. This has allowed maps of future climate-induced risks for historic buildings and their interiors to be produced. With this procedure future energy demands for building control can also be calculated.
Conclusion
With the newly developed method described here not only can outdoor risks for cultural heritage assets resulting from climate change be assessed, but also risks for indoor collections. This can be done for individual buildings as well as on a larger scale in the form of European risk maps. By using different standardized and exemplary artificial buildings in modelling climate change impact, a comparison between different regions in Europe has become possible for the first time. The methodology will serve heritage owners and managers as a decision tool, helping them to plan more effectively mitigation and adaption measures at various levels.
Regional planning is an essential element of comprehensive archaeological management programs. Most regional planning efforts in archaeology focus on predictive modeling to distinguish areas based on the likelihood of encountering archaeological resources. We discuss a complementary
approach that uses known sites and expert opinion to identify spatially explicit cultural resource preservation priorities. Loosely analogous to biodiversity conservation planning, priority cultural resource assessments provide an evolving vision of an archaeological reserve network which,
if managed appropriately, could protect a significant part of our cultural heritage. We outline an efficient approach to identifying spatially explicit Priority Areas within portions of Arizona and New Mexico. This information complements assessments of individual site eligibility for purposes
of listing on the National Register of Historic Places by providing an added layer of regionally contextualized information at larger geographic scales. By establishing priorities, this information can also enhance cultural resource considerations in local, state, and federal land use planning.
While our consideration of significance is based on the potential information content of the resource, we argue that this planning process can easily incorporate other cultural resource values and help to address preservation actions in support of this broader set of values.
The world population is concentrated near the coasts, as are a large number of Cultural World Heritage sites, defined by the UNESCO. Using spatially explicit sea-level estimates for the next 2000 years and high-resolution topography data, we compute which current cultural heritage sites will be affected by sea-level rise at different levels of sustained future warming. As indicators for the pressure on future cultural heritage we estimate the percentage of each country’s area loss, and the percentage of current population living in regions that will be permanently below sea level, for different temperature levels. If the current global mean temperature was sustained for the next two millennia, about 6% (40 sites) of the UNESCO sites will be affected, and 0.7% of global land area will be below mean sea level. These numbers increase to 19% (136 sites) and 1.1% for a warming of 3 K. At this warming level, 3-12 countries will experience a loss of more than half of their current land surface, 25-36 countries lose at least 10% of their territory, and 7% of the global population currently lives in regions that will be below local sea level. Given the millennial scale lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, our results indicate that fundamental decisions with regard to mankind’s cultural heritage are required.
Many conservation planning frameworks rely on the assumption that one should prioritize locations for management actions based on the highest predicted conservation value (i.e., abundance, occupancy). This strategy may underperform relative to the expected outcome if one is working with a limited budget or the predicted responses are uncertain. Yet, cost and tolerance to uncertainty rarely become part of species management plans. We used field data and predictive models to simulate a decision problem involving western burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia hypugaea) using prairie dog colonies (Cynomys ludovicianus) in western Nebraska. We considered 2 species management strategies: one maximized abundance and the other maximized abundance in a cost-efficient way. We then used heuristic decision algorithms to compare the 2 strategies in terms of how well they met a hypothetical conservation objective. Finally, we performed an info-gap decision analysis to determine how these strategies performed under different budget constraints and uncertainty about owl response. Our results suggested that when budgets were sufficient to manage all sites, the maximizing strategy was optimal and suggested investing more in expensive actions. This pattern persisted for restricted budgets up to approximately 50% of the sufficient budget. Below this budget, the cost-efficient strategy was optimal and suggested investing in cheaper actions. When uncertainty in the expected responses was introduced, the strategy that maximized abundance remained robust under a sufficient budget. Reducing the budget induced a slight trade-off between expected performance and robustness, which suggested that the most robust strategy depended both on one's budget and tolerance to uncertainty. Our results suggest that wildlife managers should explicitly account for budget limitations and be realistic about their expected levels of performance. © 2013 The Wildlife Society.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the role of narrative in constructing culture, deriving from scholarship in anthropology, geography, folklore, and communication studies. In this article, the author uses popular folk legends, collected in one state, to bring together some of this interdisciplinary scholarship on the central role of narrative in everyday life. In particular, the author focuses on how these shared narratives serve culturally to construct a sense of place and, with that, a sense of cultural identity that includes some people while excluding others.
Sustainable natural resource use and management make novel demands on governance arrangements, the design of which requires normative guidance. Although governance principles have been developed for diverse contexts, their availability for sustainable natural resource governance is so far limited. In response, we present a suite of governance principles for natural resource governance that, while developed in an Australian multilevel context, has general applicability and significance at local, subnational, and national scales. The principles can be used to direct the design of governance institutions that are legitimate, transparent, accountable, inclusive, and fair and that also exhibit functional and structural integration, capability, and adaptability. Together, they can also serve as a platform for developing governance monitoring and evaluation instruments, crucial for both self-assessment and external audit purposes.
Substantial investment in climate change research has led to dire predictions of the impacts and risks to biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report cites 28,586 studies demonstrating significant biological changes in terrestrial systems. Already high extinction rates, driven primarily by habitat loss, are predicted to increase under climate change. Yet there is little specific advice or precedent in the literature to guide climate adaptation investment for conserving biodiversity within realistic economic constraints. Here we present a systematic ecological and economic analysis of a climate adaptation problem in one of the world's most species-rich and threatened ecosystems: the South African fynbos. We discover a counterintuitive optimal investment strategy that switches twice between options as the available adaptation budget increases. We demonstrate that optimal investment is nonlinearly dependent on available resources, making the choice of how much to invest as important as determining where to invest and what actions to take. Our study emphasizes the importance of a sound analytical framework for prioritizing adaptation investments. Integrating ecological predictions in an economic decision framework will help support complex choices between adaptation options under severe uncertainty. Our prioritization method can be applied at any scale to minimize species loss and to evaluate the robustness of decisions to uncertainty about key assumptions.
We formulate the optimal landscape reconstruction problem for 22 birds in the Mount Lofty Ranges (MLR), South Australia. The goal is to determine landscape configurations with revegetation that would maximize the projected number of bird species present across all revegetated sites in the landscape. We use simulated annealing and an iterative improvement heuristic algorithm to find the efficient solutions for different objective functions and budget sizes. Under scenarios assuming that possible sites for revegetation have equal costs, our analyses suggest that revegetation programs in the region should strive to create landscapes with a mean revegetation patch size ranging from 780 to 4010 ha. The inclusion of property value data as surrogates for revegetation costs results in optimal landscapes with more highly irreplaceable (priority) sites in less expensive parts of the region and smaller average patch sizes. This illustrates how the solutions to landscape design problems change with different assumptions of economic cost. The paper represents one of the first uses of decision-modeling tools for optimal habitat restoration on a real landscape. The software and methodology have applicability for general landscape design outside the Mount Lofty Ranges.
Species responses to climate change may be influenced by changes in available habitat, as well as population processes, species interactions and interactions between demographic and landscape dynamics. Current methods for assessing these responses fail to provide an integrated view of these influences because they deal with habitat change or population dynamics, but rarely both. In this study, we linked a time series of habitat suitability models with spatially explicit stochastic population models to explore factors that influence the viability of plant species populations under stable and changing climate scenarios in South African fynbos, a global biodiversity hot spot. Results indicate that complex interactions between life history, disturbance regime and distribution pattern mediate species extinction risks under climate change. Our novel mechanistic approach allows more complete and direct appraisal of future biotic responses than do static bioclimatic habitat modelling approaches, and will ultimately support development of more effective conservation strategies to mitigate biodiversity losses due to climate change.
Cultural resources in coastal parks and recreation areas are vulnerable to climate change. The US National Park Service (NPS) is facing the challenge of insufficient budget allocations for both maintenance and climate adaptation of historic structures. Research on adaptation planning for cultural resources has predominately focused on vulnerability assessments of heritage sites; however, few studies integrate multiple factors (e.g., vulnerability, cultural significance, use potential, and costs) that managers should consider when making tradeoff decisions about which cultural resources to prioritize for adaptation. Moreover, heritage sites typically include multiple types of cultural resources, and researchers have yet to examine such complex tradeoffs. This study applies the Optimal Preservation (OptiPres) Model as a decision support framework to evaluate the tradeoffs of adaptation actions among multiple types of historic structures—wooden buildings, masonry and concrete buildings, forts, and batteries—under varying budget scenarios. Results suggest that the resource values of different types of historic structures vary greatly under a range of budget scenarios, and tradeoffs have to be made among different types of historical structures to achieve optimal planning objectives. Moreover, periodic, incremental funding and partial maintenance are identified as optimal funding strategies for preservation needs of cost-intensive historic structures. Also, adaptative use of historical buildings (e.g., building occupancy) can improve the resource values when budget are constrained. The OptiPres Model provides managers with a unique framework to inform adaptation planning efforts for a broad range of historic structures, which is transferable across coastal parks to enhance historic preservation planning under climate change.
Climate science has outlined targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions necessary to provide a substantial chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change on both natural and human systems. How to reach those targets, however, requires balancing physical realities of the natural environment with the complexity of the human social environment, including histories, cultures, and values. Archaeology is the study of interactions of natural and social environments through time and across space. As well, the field of cultural resources management, which includes archaeology, regularly engages with values such as site significance and allocation of funding that the modern social environment ascribes to its own history. Through these two approaches, archaeology has potential to provide both data for and methods of addressing challenges the global community faces through climate change. To date, however, archaeology and related areas of cultural heritage have had relatively little role in the global climate response. Here, we assess the social environment of archaeology and climate change and resulting structural barriers that have limited use of archaeology in and for climate change with a case study of the US federal government. On this basis, we provide recommendations to the fields of archaeology and climate response about how to more fully realize the multiple potential uses of archaeology for the challenges of climate change.
Climate change and urban growth impact habitats, species, and ecosystem services. To buffer against global change, an established adaptation strategy is designing protected areas to increase representation and complementarity of biodiversity features. Uncertainty regarding the scale and magnitude of landscape change complicates reserve planning and exposes decision makers to risk of failing to meet conservation goals. Conservation planning tends to treat risk as an absolute measure, ignoring the context of the management problem and risk preferences of stakeholders. Application to conservation of risk management theory emphasizes diversification of portfolio of assets, with the goal of reducing the impact of system volatility on investment return. We use principles of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), which quantifies risk as the variance and correlation among assets, to formalize diversification as an explicit strategy for managing risk in climate‐driven reserve design. We extend MPT to specify a framework that evaluates multiple conservation objectives, allows decision makers to balance management benefits and risk when preferences are contested or unknown, and includes additional decision options such as parcel divestment when evaluating candidate reserve designs. We apply an efficient search algorithm that optimizes portfolio design for large conservation problems and a game theoretic approach to evaluate portfolio tradeoffs that satisfy decision makers with divergent benefit and risk tolerances, or when a single decision maker cannot resolve their own preferences. Evaluating several risk profiles for a case study in South Carolina, our results suggest that a reserve design may be somewhat robust to differences in risk attitude but that budgets will likely be important determinants of conservation planning strategies, particularly when divestment is considered a viable alternative. We identify a possible fiscal threshold where adequate resources allow protecting a sufficiently diverse portfolio of habitats such that the risk of failing to achieve conservation objectives is considerably lower. For a range of sea‐level rise projections, conversion of habitat to open water (14‐180%) and wetland loss (1‐7%) are unable to be compensated under the current protected network. In contrast, optimal reserve design outcomes are predicted to ameliorate expected losses relative to current and future habitat protected under the existing conservation estate. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Climate change impacts can negatively affect tourism demand and, subsequently, local economies by disrupting access and altering physical conditions, including those from adaptation and recovery efforts. Research is needed that helps destinations become more climate ready, including studies of decision factors that influence trip-taking behaviors. This paper presents findings from a discrete choice experiment to determine how physical and economic changes could affect visitation behaviors to a vulnerable coastal destination, the Outer Banks region of North Carolina, USA. We embedded our experiment within an on-site visitor survey to reveal thresholds of negative changes to coastal attributes that tourists are willing to tolerate, and also examined tourists’ willingness to substitute their future trips to the region. Transportation-related changes had the highest relative importance among the four selected attributes. The likelihood of three types of spatial substitution, spurred by not being able to access the destination, were consistently related to residency but less consistently related to place meanings, visitation history, and other demographic variables. Study results can inform climate change planning within coastal zones to minimize negative impacts to tourism demand, such as the need to develop creative revenue streams to maintain resilience in communities that rely on occupancy taxes.
Climate change is increasing the speed at which tangible coastal cultural heritage is changing in character or being lost through weathering, erosion, and inundation. Damages to coastal archeological sites, loss of access to historical sites, and the alteration of cultural landscapes will force changes in the way researchers can study sites, tourists can enjoy places, and descendant communities who have lived in particular areas for time immemorial, and local community members can utilize and relate to landscapes. In the USA, the National Park Service is a primary coastal cultural resource management organization. The National Park Service has been working on climate change adaptation for cultural resources for over a decade; however, there are few examples of parks in which long range climate change adaptation plans for cultural resources have been implemented. Building from 20 semi-structured interviews with cultural resource managers in three parks, we found that institutional structures within the National Park Service, as well as historical conceptual framings specific to the research, recreational, and interpretive values of cultural resources act as barriers to managers’ ability to design and implement climate change adaptation plans. Institutional barriers managers discussed include the dependence of climate change adaptation decisions partnership projects and the leveraging of budgetary and staff resources within NPS that may affect climate change adaptation capacity. We found that park managers often saw impacts in parks that may be associated with climate change, but found it difficult to separate normal maintenance from climate change affected deterioration, which may lead to status quo management actions rather than revised planning for a changing future regime. Conceptual barriers managers discussed revealed a conflict between preservation needs of research versus interpretive uses and while NPS guidance recommends prioritization of cultural resources for preservation at the park level, regional managers were more focused on this topic than park managers. As NPS moves forward with climate change adaptation planning, opportunities to develop and improve cultural resource preservation with new technologies, improved prioritization schemes, and include public input in resource preservation may help coastal managers overcome these barriers.
Today, cultural heritage planning and decision-making operate under considerable climate, political, and financial uncertainties and constraints. Consequently, decision-makers are often left making value-laden judgments of what to preserve, restore, and maintain in their best judgments, which can leave them open to criticism for not protecting the cultural resources most important to various and diverse stakeholder groups. Thus, a transparent and robust process to optimally maintain cultural heritage values for present and future generations is needed. We address this knowledge gap by developing a novel, transparent, and value-based measurement framework for assessing relative "historical significance" and "use potential" of diverse historic buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places (United States). Measures of historical significance include: the association of a building with the purpose of a NPS site's foundation, the current physical condition of a building, the building's historic character, and National Register listing criteria. Specific measures of use potential consider the importance of historic building's operational, third party, visitor, interpretative, and scientific uses. The application of the framework is presented using a subset of buildings located within two separately listed historic districts at Cape Lookout National Seashore, North Carolina. The framework focuses on the current status of the cultural resource's significance and use potential while acknowledging that corresponding attributes, metrics and weights can change over time and should be regularly updated. It is hoped that the historical significance and use potential framework can assist the decision-makers and stakeholders, and better inform both the cultural heritage management and allocation prioritization for climate adaptation planning when it is applied in tandem with climate change vulnerability assessments.
Cultural resources in the Northern Rockies are currently vulnerable to various natural and human agencies, including wildfire and biological processes, vandalism and other depreciative human behaviors, and changing population demographics and recreational use. Climate change has the potential to accelerate some of these ongoing effects to cultural resources. Increasing wildfires will have a direct effect on cultural resources, because they are broadly distributed throughout forest and grassland ecosystems. Melting ice caused by climate change poses a risk to previously ice-encased and well-preserved cultural resources. Seasonal aridity and prolonged drought will accelerate soil deflation and erosion, and expose archaeological sites once buried in prairie or mountain soils. At the same time, a projected increase in winter precipitation, coupled with earlier and more intense spring runoff, poses another threat to cultural resources. Climate-induced changes in terrestrial and aquatic habitats also affect abundance of culturally-valued plants, animals and fish, affecting the ability of Native American tribes to exercise their treaty rights.
This book outlines the creative process of making environmental management decisions using the approach called Structured Decision Making. It is a short introductory guide to this popular form of decision making and is aimed at environmental managers and scientists. This is a distinctly pragmatic label given to ways for helping individuals and groups think through tough multidimensional choices characterized by uncertain science, diverse stakeholders, and difficult tradeoffs. This is the everyday reality of environmental management, yet many important decisions currently are made on an ad hoc basis that lacks a solid value-based foundation, ignores key information, and results in selection of an inferior alternative. Making progress - in a way that is rigorous, inclusive, defensible and transparent - requires combining analytical methods drawn from the decision sciences and applied ecology with deliberative insights from cognitive psychology, facilitation and negotiation. The authors review key methods and discuss case-study examples based in their experiences in communities, boardrooms, and stakeholder meetings. The goal of this book is to lay out a compelling guide that will change how you think about making environmental decisions. © 2012 by R. Gregory, L. Failing, M. Harstone, G. Long, T. McDaniels, and D. Ohlson. All rights reserved.
The paper introduces a novel method for risk assessment and preventive conservation of organic hygroscopic cultural heritage objects. The method is based on the analysis of the historic climate that is established in the European Standard EN15757:2010. This new approach enables interpreting visible damage and assessing cause-effect relationships and it finds practical application in improving conservation strategies for real life buildings and objects. The paper investigates how it may be advantageous to reconstruct the historic climate back in time to obtain sound information about the target relative humidity (RH) level and the domain of RH fluctuations that can be considered safe for conservation. The method was applied to an inlaid wooden choir in the basilica of S. Giustina, Padua, Italy. The past indoor climate has been reconstructed over the whole life of the object, built in 1477, with documentary proxy data, instrumental readings and building simulation. Winter has been found to be the most critical season for the mechanical stress and wood yield. For the future, the indoor climate has been simulated until 2100 to timely devise preventive conservation measures to reduce the risk induced by climate change. Finally an evaluation of uncertainties has been considered.
The United States National Park Service has begun conducting storm vulnerability assessments in response to past storm events that have impacted natural and cultural resources in coastal parks and in preparation for potential changes due to climate change. Components will be developed to assess, manage and respond to the vulnerability of park resources to storm events. Park-specific storm vulnerability assessments of natural and cultural resources will be conducted based on the likelihood of a park being impacted by specific types of storms events. A park-specific storm recovery plan with particular emphasis on assessing, post-storm the status of park resources and the development of short-, medium-, and long-term guidance documents to manage the park's resources is being developed.
As a major contributor to local economies, the tourism industry has been greatly impacted by natural disasters. This study demonstrates the association between tourism economies and impacts of hurricanes in the southeastern United States containing coastal national parks, known for attracting a large number of tourists and having experienced hurricanes. In keeping with two longitudinal data methods (i.e. panel logit model and autoregressive integrated moving average), this study focused on the relationship between the (1) duration, intensity, and damage of hurricanes; (2) existing climate conditions; and (3) tourism demand on park visitation during hurricane and tourism seasons. As a whole, the impacts of hurricanes and climate conditions (precipitation, temperature) were found to have a negative effect on tourism demands (park visitation). With regard to the response of tourism economies to natural disaster damage, parks that experienced stronger natural disasters may be closed for a longer period in order to reconstruct facilities or natural/cultural resources damaged by storms. In an attempt to improve tourism-based regional economies, overcome the challenge of natural disasters on tourism economies, and increase opportunities for establishing disaster management, it is necessary to make an effort to allay unexpected damage to tourism-based areas through proactive plans for disaster mitigation activities.
Purpose
– The psychological contract is defined as a perceived exchange agreement of promissory obligations between employee and organization. Most approaches to this concept ignore the role of context in shaping its features. However, others have pointed out the need to evaluate the features of the construct within the context in which it is studied. Three salient features of the construct include the use of the term “promises” versus “obligations”, its implicit nature and reference to the “other” party, and the exchange content. Rousseau and Schalk suggest that these features are weighted and interpreted differently across different countries. The purpose of this paper is to test this proposition in the island state of Malta, a European Union micro‐state.
Design/methodology/approach
– Semi‐structured interviews are used. Three questions are addressed: do employment obligations vary from promises in this context? Are employment obligations in this context necessarily explicited? Who is considered the employer in this context?.
Findings
– The results show that some findings are similar to those found in other settings (e.g. acknowledgement of an exchange relationship in employment), others are more context‐bound (e.g. the meaning of obligations as predicting future reciprocal behaviours compared to promises). The paper also shows that many of these understandings are related to and construed by the way the employment relationship is construed in a country like Malta.
Originality/value
– These findings strengthen the need to incorporate the contextual realities in which the features of the construct are employed as this has implications for both the generalizability of results and theory building.
Climate change is likely to alter the spatial distributions of species and habitat types but the nature of such change is uncertain. Thus, climate change makes it difficult to implement standard conservation planning paradigms. Previous work has suggested some approaches to cope with such uncertainty but has not harnessed all of the benefits of risk diversification. We adapt Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to optimal spatial targeting of conservation activity, using wetland habitat conservation in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) as an example. This approach finds the allocations of conservation activity among subregions of the planning area that maximize the expected conservation returns for a given level of uncertainty or minimize uncertainty for a given expected level of returns. We find that using MPT instead of simple diversification in the PPR can achieve a value of the conservation objective per dollar spent that is 15% higher for the same level of risk. MPT-based portfolios can also have 21% less uncertainty over benefits or 6% greater expected benefits than the current portfolio of PPR conservation. Total benefits from conservation investment are higher if returns are defined in terms of benefit-cost ratios rather than benefits alone. MPT-guided diversification can work to reduce the climate-change-induced uncertainty of future ecosystem-service benefits from many land policy and investment initiatives, especially when outcomes are negatively correlated between subregions of a planning area.
Climate change over the past approximately 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction. Using projections of species' distributions for future climate scenarios, we assess extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. Exploring three approaches in which the estimated probability of extinction shows a power-law relationship with geographical range size, we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15-37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'. When the average of the three methods and two dispersal scenarios is taken, minimal climate-warming scenarios produce lower projections of species committed to extinction ( approximately 18%) than mid-range ( approximately 24%) and maximum-change ( approximately 35%) scenarios. These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.
The world's forests influence climate through physical, chemical, and biological processes that affect planetary energetics,
the hydrologic cycle, and atmospheric composition. These complex and nonlinear forest-atmosphere interactions can dampen or
amplify anthropogenic climate change. Tropical, temperate, and boreal reforestation and afforestation attenuate global warming
through carbon sequestration. Biogeophysical feedbacks can enhance or diminish this negative climate forcing. Tropical forests
mitigate warming through evaporative cooling, but the low albedo of boreal forests is a positive climate forcing. The evaporative
effect of temperate forests is unclear. The net climate forcing from these and other processes is not known. Forests are under
tremendous pressure from global change. Interdisciplinary science that integrates knowledge of the many interacting climate
services of forests with the impacts of global change is necessary to identify and understand as yet unexplored feedbacks
in the Earth system and the potential of forests to mitigate climate change.
Policy Memorandum 14-02, climate change and Stewardship of cultural resources
National Park Service. (2010). National Park Service climate
change response strategy. Author.
National Park Service. (2014). Policy Memorandum 14-02, climate
change and Stewardship of cultural resources. Author.
Adapting to climate change in coastal parks: Estimating the exposure of park assets to 1 m of sea-level rise
- K Peek
- B Tormey
- H Thompson
- R Young
- S Norton
- J Mcnamee
- R Scavo
Peek, K., Tormey, B., Thompson, H., Young, R., Norton, S.,
McNamee, J., & Scavo, R. (2017). Adapting to climate change
in coastal parks: Estimating the exposure of park assets to 1 m
of sea-level rise. National Park Service.
Cultural resources climate change strategy
- M Rockman
- M Morgan
- S Ziaja
- G Hambrecht
- A Meadow
Rockman, M., Morgan, M., Ziaja, S., Hambrecht, G., & Meadow,
A. (2016). Cultural resources climate change strategy.
National Park Service.