Adaptive Strategies
Develop Climate-Smart Strategies
Once goals have been defined, determine the most effective strategies to achieve them and the activities required to implement those strategies. A strategy is a general course of action taken to meet a goal, while an activity is a specific task needed to implement a strategy.
These strategies can be simple adjustments to existing approaches (e.g., increasing the protection of herbivore species), or they can include new or innovative approaches (e.g., coordinating with agencies to reduce wastewater discharge, testing new coral reef restoration practices). Strategies may also call for forging new partnerships (e.g., with neighboring MPAs or other organizations and agencies working in the area to jointly plan for the protection of species that are migrating due to climate change).
The CCAP Compendium includes a list of core Climate-Smart strategies: ref
- Reduce Non-Climate Stressors: Minimize localized stressors that weaken the ability of species or ecosystems to withstand or adjust to climate events.
- Protect Key Ecosystem Features: Focus on conserving structural characteristics, organisms, and areas essential for maintaining resilience.
- Ensure Connectivity: Facilitate the movement of energy, nutrients, organisms, and genes to sustain ecosystem function.
- Protect Refugia: Safeguard areas that are naturally less affected by climate change as sources of recovery or migration destinations for climate-sensitive species.
- Manage outside MPA boundaries: build partnerships to protect refugia outside of the boundaries of the MPA that may be critical for resilience and recovery within MPA boundaries. Additionally, there may be instances when MPA boundaries should be modified to accommodate relocation of organisms, such as when mangroves migrate inland.
- Manage for Social Resilience: Strengthen the social, political, economic, and institutional capacities needed to adapt to and recover from climate impacts.
- Support Evolutionary Potential: Protect diverse species, populations, and systems to hedge against losses and assist positive evolutionary change.
- Restore Natural Ecosystem Structure and Function: Rebuild or modify compromised ecosystems to restore desired habitat structures and ecosystem functions like nutrient cycling and carbon storage.
- Relocate Organisms: Assist in the movement or translocation of species to support their persistence or transition in changing environments.
Example: Queen Conch Protection in The Bahamas
Healthy queen conchs feed on a sea grass bed in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, The Bahamas. Photo © Jeff Yonover
Queen conch have long been a culturally and economically important species in The Bahamas, but signs of population collapse are raising alarm—even in areas under protection. In several marine parks, monitoring has revealed that adult densities remain too low to sustain long-term reproduction, and few juveniles are present to replenish aging populations. ref
In one case, researchers found that despite an abundance of adult conch within an MPA, reproductive success was limited, and larval supply appeared to come from outside the park, suggesting the MPA was neither large enough nor ideally located to protect a self-sustaining conch population. ref In other areas, scientists observed that warming ocean temperatures may be prompting conch to shift their distribution, creating a mismatch between static MPA boundaries and mobile species. ref
This reveals a key challenge: how can conservation partners in The Bahamas manage a mobile species within static MPA boundaries? Management plans need to accommodate ecological change and cross-boundary coordination, highlighting the need for Climate-Smart, adaptive management that considers species migration, broader larval connectivity, and regional collaboration.
The most effective management strategies address priority threats while meeting the following criteria:
- Feasibility: Can the action be implemented realistically?
- Effectiveness: Will the action achieve the desired impact?
- Flexibility: Can the action adapt to changing conditions?
- Social Acceptability: Will stakeholders support the action?
Selecting strategies carefully ensures they are practical, impactful, and aligned with long-term conservation goals.
Each Climate-Smart strategy should include a carefully crafted SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) objective. Traditionally, objectives include the degree to which a threat should be abated; however, climate change threats cannot be abated (e.g., increasing sea surface temperatures) but their impact can be mitigated (e.g., increased thermal resilience). In addition to reflecting the reality of climate change threats, SMART objectives define the measures against which progress should be tracked for an adaptive approach (see next page).
An example of Climate-Smart Management Approach, Goal, Objectives, and Strategies for mangroves:
| Conservation Feature - Mangroves | |
|---|---|
| Goal – A formal statement detailing the desired future status of a conservation feature | Maintain mangrove cover at the level of a 2010 baseline. |
| Management Approach | Resist the effects of cyclones, while accepting the effects of other climate change until a viable management strategy becomes available. |
| Objective – statements of the outcomes that you believe are necessary to attain your goals. | • By 2035, the hydrology of mangrove is restored to pre-hurricane conditions. • By 2030, managers, in partnership with local volunteers have the capacity to restore up to 20 hectares of mangroves annually. |
| Strategy – a general course of action that will be taken to achieve an objective (a series of actions). | • Restore hydrodynamic regime. • Develop a nursery and propagate resistant species. • Train and equip park staff and volunteers to undertake restoration. |
The Climate Adaptation Toolkit was developed in partnership with the Blue Nature Alliance, a global partnership to catalyze effective large-scale ocean conservation. Additional insights and resources were provided by our friends at Conservation International, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) MPA Center.
