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Project Summary
Communities along the coast simultaneously face impacts from climate-influenced changes in offshore systems, such as sea level rise, shoreline erosion, hurricanes, and associated tidal surges and flooding, and in inland systems, including interior rainfall from intense storms. Large-scale changes to landscapes as a result of development can exacerbate the effects of such climate-related changes, further altering patterns of land cover and use and degrading water quality and quantity. Coastal planning in the context of such diverse stresses poses a significant challenge for local planners and communities.
Planning is particularly difficult for climate-change related hazards. The information needs of coastal planners are large, and also not easy to satisfy. First, the hazards for which communities are planning are rare events and past experiences with hazards are not adequate to judge future risks. Second, there are considerable uncertainties about the magnitude and frequency of predicted hazards. Third, addressing the impacts of climate change demands a focus on adaptation, and processes that support or hinder it, which in turn requires more than information about the natural and biological processes at play. Local planners also need to understand the socioeconomic dimensions of local vulnerability and resilience.
There are many ways to inform planning, but scenarios have proven especially effective. Planners are aided by scenarios that focus attention on relationships between critical variables, summarize management action alternatives, identify links to people’s valuation of outcomes, comprehensively assess the outcomes that people care about, and include practical indicators that can measure performance.
Our goal is to improve the process by which communities plan for managing coastal hazards associated with climate change and to provide guidance to practitioners and local officials about how to integrate adaptation planning into existing planning activities. As part of our project we have developed an approach that facilitates building of scenarios about the impacts of climate change and opportunities for adaptation. We call our process the Vulnerability and Consequences Adaptation Planning Scenarios (VCAPS) process. An interactive diagramming tool is used to create visual representations of the scenarios, as causal pathways linking climate stressors, consequences, vulnerabilities, and adaptation options. This is accomplished in a process that integrates locally specific knowledge with scientific information about climate hazards.
In this project we are refining and testing VCAPS in two South Carolina coastal communities: Sullivan’s Island and McClellanville. In addition, we are conducting outreach workshops to show local planners and extension agents the benefits of using conceptually grounded scenario-building approaches for climate change adaptation.
Impacts to coastal areas due to hazards associated with climate change are many: sea level rise, shoreline erosion, hurricanes, and associated tidal surges and flooding. The effects of such changes are exacerbated by human development, which changes land cover and degrades water quality and quantity. Planning for climate change in the context of such diverse stresses poses a significant challenge for coastal managers and communities. They must understand how stresses interact to produce impacts. They must also understand how impacts are related to differences in vulnerability, and how vulnerabilities and impacts can be mitigated via short-term adjustments and longer-term adaptations. Coastal systems are particularly complex, making it even more difficult for decision-makers to examine the time lags, feedbacks, and nonlinearities affecting climate change impacts. The challenge is exacerbated because planners are confronted with many uncertainties.
Successful adaptation and mitigation of hazard impacts in coastal regions requires the generation of realistic risk and adaptation scenarios and models in processes that pay close attention to producing knowledge that informs decision-making and produces community acceptance. Local decision makers can benefit from a conceptual characterization of hazards that enables them to examine threats, consequences, and management interventions as a causal sequence resulting from a stream of choices and activities. This is best accomplished in a process that involves integrating locally specific knowledge about social stressors with generalized scientific information about potential hazard impacts. We are responding to the recent finding by Tribbia and Moser that: “…what is surprising is that [managers] do not have, do not know of, or do not find vulnerability assessment tools currently availably sufficient, and maybe that scientists have not made them more accessible or user-friendly to practitioners.”
We intend to use our recently developed decision making aid to inform scenario-building and planning for coastal management. VCAPS – Vulnerability and Consequences Adaptation Planning Scenarios -- is a facilitated process that enables users to construct and display causal pathways that link hazard events, exposures, and consequences with the ways that consequences are mediated by vulnerability. It allows users to focus on elements or pathways of interest while retaining the greater system complexity and to easily elaborate information on pathways. The process can also promote deliberative-analytical dialogue and we intend to build a collaborative network of local coastal decision makers by having them learn to use the model in applied settings. Our goal is to examine the planning and decision-making support VCAPS can offer local decision makers in coastal management planning. We will work with coastal managers and community members to evaluate how VCAPS can structure the gathering and analysis of decision-relevant information, inform adaptive action and resilience strategies, and highlight critical data gaps to inform future monitoring and research activities.
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