Michael Flaxman

Synthesis: Developing the Institutions to Coordinate Science, Politics, and Communities for Action to Restore and Sustain Lands

Making a leap forward in restoring and sustaining lands requires more than refining conventional approaches for formulating environmental policy and making natural resource decisions. We are in a period of transition and evolution with regard to managing the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems. New forms of governance are emerging. We need institutions that will distill and harness the wisdom residing in diverse societies, facilitate dialogue, and enhance mutual learning about shared problems. We need governance regimes and processes that bridge the gaps among disciplines, methods, and current institutions that include public, private, and academic participants. New institutions and governance regimes will enable an ongoing process of collaborative action and shared decision making that supports durable environmental policy and land use decisions that sustain communities, economies, and the environment.

Using Participatory Scenario Simulation to Plan for Conservation Under Climate Change in the Greater Everglades Landscape

Because changing climate is expected to shift the distribution of suitable areas for many species, it poses a substantial challenge to conventional conservation planning approaches which rely on the establishment of fixed protected areas. Over the next decades, climate change will also cause changes in human settlement patterns and on demands for various ecosystem services. New conservation methods are needed to deal with these complex phenomena. We believe that participatory spatial simulation approaches have much to offer under such circumstances, since they address both institutional and technical planning needs. From an institutional point of view, such exercises engage relevant stakeholders across various agencies and administrative jurisdictions. From a technical point of view, the simulations performed provide actionable information, since they help to prioritize potential conservation actions and generate landscape-scale strategies. This chapter presents a case study applying such an approach to the challenges of conservation planning for the Greater Florida Everglades.

The Upper San Pedro River Basin

The San Pedro River begins in Sonora, Mexico, and flows northward through Arizona, United States, before joining the Gila River, which flows into the Colorado, and finally empties into the Gulf of California.… The Upper San Pedro River Basin in Sonora and Arizona is the focus of a number of urgent, complex, interrelated, and controversial issues, including its international importance as bird habitat, its attractiveness to development, and the vulnerability of its landscape to changes caused directly by development and indirectly via continued lowering of the groundwater table.

Restoring and Sustaining Lands—Coordinating Science, Politics, and Community for Action

We propose that a new conceptual framework is needed for conservation and land restoration to achieve sustainability. We present two conceptual models—Static Productive Harmony and Dynamic Productive Harmony—for formulating environmental policy and making natural resource management decisions. The static model seeks a balance among ecological, social, and economic systems through compromises that require trade-offs that often end up satisfying no one. The dynamic model represents a fundamentally different approach to restoring and sustaining lands. In this model, healthy ecosystems are the foundation for thriving communities and dynamic economies. The dynamic model aims to generate resource management approaches that add value to each of the systems for a mutual gains outcome. Restoring and sustaining lands is a wicked problem. New institutions need to be shaped that support ongoing collaborative and participatory processes to achieve durable and equitable environmental policy.

Using “Spatial Resilience Planning” to Test Climate-Adaptive Conservation Strategies

How can we plan more effective conservation networks in the face of climate change, urbanization pressure and financial and policy uncertainty? We have developed and present here a strategy which we call “spatial resilience planning” or SRP. The method is an extension of “alternative futures” scenario planning (Steinitz et al. 2003) and builds from the same social and technological infrastructure. It relies on stakeholder-based participatory simulation to generate a set of scenarios which encapsulate the major uncertainties and choices faced within a geographically-bounded area. It also uses formal spatial impact models to assess the consequences of scenarios to species, habitats and to people. The difference between SRP and conventional scenario planning is in the way the scenarios are organized and tested. SRP draws a clear separation between “planning actions” (which are within the domain of influence of participating stakeholders) and all other “drivers of change.” It asks the question: which are the planning actions under stakeholder influence that might best accomplish stated goals in the face of significant and uncertain exogenous forces? This can be considered a form of “policy sensitivity testing.” This chapter presents a first example of this approach, in the context of Florida conservation planning under climate change.