Adaptation Pathways: a playbook for developing options for climate change adaptation in Natural Resource Management

<p>This playbook is a result of collaborative exploration, design and testing of the approach among the <i>Southern Slopes Climate Change Adaptation Research Partnership</i> (SCARP) research team and Natural Resources Management (NRM) planners from the nine agencies in the Southern Slopes region of Australia. It should be considered a working document that will evolve and change through application and learning.</p> <p>This playbook presents an approach to climate change adaptation planning known as adaptation pathways – ‘an analytical approach to planning that explores and sequences a set of possible actions that are based on external developments over time’ (Haasnoot <i>et al</i>. 2013:485). It guides users through five broad activities or ‘plays’ that make up an approach to pathways planning. It provides a brief description of each activity and directs the user to relevant sections of the supporting <i>Southern Slopes Information Report</i> (Wallis <i>et al</i>. 2014), which provides greater detail on each activity, including links torelevant resources and literature.</p> <p>The five key activities of this approach to pathways planning are:</p> <ul> <li>Define objectives for pathways (Section 2.1)</li> <li>Understand the current situation (Section 2.2)</li> <li>Analyse possible futures (Section 2.3)</li> <li>Develop adaptation pathways (Section 2.4)</li> <li>Implementation, monitoring, evaluation, reporting, improvement (MERI) and learning (Section 2.5)</li> </ul> <p>This playbook does not describe how to write or implement NRM plans or strategies for adaptation. Rather, it guides users through a process for identifying adaptation measures that can be used to draft an adaptation plan. This is not a prescriptive approach. Rather it seeks to reflect and support the typically non‐linear, ‘juggling’ nature of NRM planning. This juggling metaphor (adapted from Ison 2010) usefully highlights that:</p> <ul> <li>planning can be a non‐linear process, with several activities occurring at once</li> <li>planning can happen in different ways and describe different patterns</li> <li>it takes concentration to coordinate the synchronicity of everything ‘up in the air’</li> <li>while attention may focus on one ball for a moment, the whole motion is being tracked</li> <li>planning, like juggling, requires particular skills obtained through practice</li> </ul>