Be Our Guest: Planning for Climate Change, Part Two

A Case Study of Impact Scenarios in Marin County 

By Sara S. Moore, MPP/ MA, Research Consultant on Climate Change Adaptation.

What is the “scenario planning” tool?

At the state’s request, we held a workshop to test-drive the “scenario planning” tool to try to develop a set of priority action steps for resource management under climate change. Scenario planning is a tool for planning under conditions of uncertainty that has been used  by the military and the business sector, and is now in use by resource managers to plan for climate change. This tool tests strategies against a range of plausible futures (scenarios) that include the most high impact—though possibly low-probability—events. Using scenarios to test strategies builds flexibility into plans, so you aren’t caught planning only for one contingency. Resource managers in West Marin are being told conflicting things by climate scientists about the future behavior of fog and rain, so they don’t want to plan ONLY for a rainier, foggier future, or ONLY for a drier future with no fog. Scenario planning allows you to plan for both.

One aspect of scenario planning that should not be neglected is that it is not intended to be used the way we used it, as a one-off exercise. If plans based on scenarios are actually intended to lead to action, they should be modified as new information on climate change is available: scenarios are supposed to be revisited and improved over time. At the end of our workshop, it was clear that participants wanted both more scientific information on climate change, and the chance to improve the scenarios on that basis. Unfortunately, our funding only provided for this one exercise.

How did we create the West Marin scenarios for climate change planning?

The National Park Service (NPS) has used scenarios to experiment with climate change planning since 2007, after a pilot workshop held in Joshua Tree National Park. I studied the pilot workshop format, collected input from the NPS workshop organizers, and, in a stroke of luck, hired the same workshop facilitator used by the NPS from the firm that pioneered the use of scenario planning in the business sector, the Global Business Network.  It just happened that the facilitator lived in Marin. We followed the GBN model for the development of scenarios. First, we selected the high-impact factors (of all kinds: climate, plus economic, technological, social, and political) in the decision-making environment. Then, we identified the factors with high certainty (“inevitabilities”), and those with high uncertainty. Then we tried to identify the uncertainties that might create nightmare scenarios, like a repeat of the 1995 Vision Fire in Point Reyes in a populated area. Based on available information on climate change in West Marin, the ten scientists and resource managers I recruited to help develop the scenarios selected the following factors for the West Marin scenarios (looking at the uncertainties, you can see that wildfire is a great worry):

Four “Certainties”

1. Temperature increasing, 
2. Sea level rising, 
3. Seasonal extremes increasing, and 
4. Biodiversity declining. 

Three “Uncertainties”

1. The onset of the dry season (earlier/ later), 
2. The direction of strong wind (more easterly/ more northerly; some discussion groups found this confusing, and replaced it with intensified La Niña or El Niño effects), 
3. The capacity to act in a resource management realm (no greater [or possibly less] capacity/ significantly greater capacity).

 

How did we use the scenarios to start planning for climate change?

On January 28, 2011, thirty-five resource managers and scientists came to the Headlands Institute to discuss these factors and the different worlds they would produce.

In the end, eight scenarios were created, interacting the three uncertainties:

“Club Marin” (earlier dry season onset, stronger northerly winds/ El Nino, high capacity to act), “Dry Sweat” (earlier dry season onset, stronger northerly winds/ El Nino, same or less capacity to act), and so on, going by the names “Fryin and Cryin,” “Leaky Boat, No Bucket,” “Lush Flush,” “Muddy Waters,” “Phoenix,” and “Playing God.” Each scenario was given a set of headlines (“Muir Woods Burns”), and possible action steps (“give penalties for overuse of water”). A few top actions were reported back for each scenario. Notably, “more collaboration” appeared in all scenarios.  

In the afternoon, we chose some criteria for taking action, evaluated our possible actions, and created a set of top ten action steps. We evaluated whether the actions were flexible, used adaptive management, were cost-effective, had clear design, or were collaborative across work sectors. Our evaluation produced ten top action steps.

Ten action steps for climate change preparation for West Marin’s protected areas

1. Create a regional and collaborative approach to adaptation. 
2. Improve fire management.
3. Improve water management.
4. Improve early detection networks to control invasive species.
5. Improve connectivity, emphasizing protecting and restoring riparian areas.
6. Create a Rapid Response Team to work on restoration after climate events or other disasters.
7. Measure change over time to inform adaptive management (e.g., improve monitoring).
8. Integrate restoration with infrastructure, making sure they work together.
9. Develop a triage framework for allocating resources.
10. Create public-private partnerships (modeled on the work of Resource Conservation Districts).

These actions are the basis of a Statement of Agreement now circulating among the workshop’s thirty-five participants, hopefully providing a basis for future collaboration. 

What’s next for West Marin?

This summer I followed-up with some of the workshop’s participants to see if there had been any movement on climate change planning in their agencies. Besides the usual problems with lack of funds to continue current operations, resource managers are working to respond to the closure threat hanging over four Marin County state parks. However, I believe the threat of climate change impacts will not be forgotten, even with the ongoing budget crisis. The participants will probably be guided more by the continually improving climate models coming from the science community than by exercises in imagination like scenario planning workshops, but they now have a set of action steps that would be useful in a range of potential low-probability, high-impact nightmare scenarios. They have just that much more power to respond to the paralyzing uncertainty that comes with climate change planning.

 

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This is Part Two of Four that Sara Moore will be sharing here on the Open Space blog.  Part One can be read here.  Stay tuned for the Part Three next Monday.

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About the author: Sara S. Moore, MPP/ MA, Research Consultant on Climate Change Adaptation. Sara most recently worked at the Zavaleta Lab, UC Santa Cruz, on a component study of the California State Climate Vulnerability Assessment. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a Master of Public Policy and an MA in International and Area Studies with a focus on government climate adaptation policy. Previously, she worked for Pacific Environment as a Russia Program Associate, helping communities protect their local environment in Siberia and the Russian Far East.  She can be reached at saramoore [at] gmail [dot] com.