Project

Climate Adaptive Planning for British Columbia (CAP-BC) is an online, open-access web-tool to provide climate–adapted systematic conservation planning to partnerships, government, NGO, private institutions and individuals in BC. CAP-BC provides a means of adapting our conservation plans to the projected impacts of climate change, thereby ensuring that our protected lands are as resilient as possible moving forward and providing a tool to our partners that promote the development of a network of protected areas in BC that is adaptive to future climate change

Why?

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in British Columbia [1, 2]. These impacts are projected to diversify and intensify over this century, which poses an unprecedented threat to our socio-economic systems and natural environment [3, 4]. There is an urgent need for solutions- focused research on how to adapt business-as-usual practices to minimize our vulnerability to such risks, particularly as they affect biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and ‘at risk’ Species.

We address in partnership with The Nature Trust of British Columbia, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and BC Parks Foundatio, the core question of the project:

• "How can we adapt our conservation plans in BC to minimize the impacts of a changing climate?"

Objectives

CAP-BC is a flexible systematic conservation planning web-tool, can provide a set of outcomes to support decisions of adapting our conservation plans to the projected impacts of climate change, thereby ensuring that our protected lands are as resilient as possible moving forward.

The web-tool is ready-to-use, preloaded with data and grouped into six major conservation approaches focused on climate change (see Framework) with an additional group for ecosystem services, cost and constraint layers. The web-tool gives users the flexibility to set particular targets for groups or for each layer, lock-in or weighting with specific layers, giving to them the flexibility to generate conservation solutions from a climate change perspective based on their needs.

Framework

Nowadays there are many conservation strategies in addition to the approaches that include climate change adaptations, most of them with different ways for conservation and biodiversity management [7], this variety of strategies tends to cause confusion and difficulty for decision-makers to determining if they are complementary, competing, or contradictory options in conservation planning [6].

Yale Framework was created with the idea to understand, organize and structure the different conservation strategies into major objectives, providing coherence for planning and conservation actions to integrate climate change adaptation strategies into the context of natural resource planning and policymaking [6].

Yale 1-3

The first three approaches are the classic conservation strategies that most of the approaches have used and currently use: (1) Protect current patterns of biodiversity, (2) Protect large, intact, natural landscapes and ecological processes and (3) Protect the geophysical setting.

These approaches are very important because they keep all essential elements need for species and biodiversity. For instance, well-managed protected areas reduce rates of habitat loss, maintain species population levels and can provide crucial ecosystem services [8], and preserve areas with diversity or high complex geophysical settings are crucial to conserve ecological and evolutionary processes and protect species associated with these features [9]. But also these classic conservation strategies help as a basis for the other three Yale strategies that are adapted to the projected climate [6].

Yale 4-6

The others three approaches address climate futures: (4) Identify and manage areas that will provide future climate space, (5) Identify and protect climate refugia and (6) Maintain and restore ecological connectivity.

These (4-6) Yale approaches address climate futures and require climate change scenarios analyses to explore the influence on species distributions and ecosystem functions and services. These conservation strategies are important because are not only about protecting what we have now, but also for future. For instance, many species and their habitats may respond to changing climate by generating changes in their geographical ranges; to preserve these species, we need to protect future climate space which can help anticipate future migration and locations for them [10]. Also, Heller and Zavaleta [7] found that increase connectivity is the best recommendation in their study about several conservation planning that have integrated climate change, additionally, increment and guarantee connectivity across different landscapes fosters the ability of species to move, migrate and shift their pattern.

Data

We carefully selected the data based on the six major adaptation objectives from the Yale framework but also we included another special group called ecosystem services, and costs and constraints layers to calibrate the solutions based on user needs. All the data were prepared and adjusted to the planning unit, which is the minimum geophysical space for planning. We define two planning units with different resolutions: 1km and 5km. Fine resolution (1km) is better and closer to the actual data and features, and also for the results (we recommend it), however it takes more time to load and process. Coarse resolution (5 km) works faster than fine resolution and provides to users with a quick exploration of layers and solutions.

Partners

This project, in partnership with The Nature Trust of British Columbia, Canadian Parks, Wilderness Society and the BC Parks Foundation, and also by UBC and UNBC universities.