Increasing resilience of natural protected areas to future climate change: A fuzzy adaptive management approach

Climate change and variability is a major threat to natural protected areas that is likely to change the mix of ecosystem goods and services provided by such areas in the future. Managers of natural protected areas may be able to increase the resilience of natural protected areas to climate change and variability by implementing compensatory management actions and evaluating their efficacy using active adaptive management. A fuzzy multiple attribute-adaptive management method is proposed that determines the most preferred compensatory management actions for increasing the resilience of natural protected areas to future climate change and variability. Use of the method requires managers to: (1) identify compensatory management actions that can alleviate potential negative impacts of future climate change and variability on natural protected areas; (2) choose the attributes of compensatory management actions used to assess their efficacy; (3) conduct statistically valid experiments in each time period that generate sample values of the attributes; (4) use the fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity of Ideal Solution to rank compensatory management actions in each time period within a planning horizon; and (5) use the rankings to determine the optimal adaptive management strategy for a planning horizon. The method accounts for uncertainty about the nature of future climate change and variability and the extent to which compensatory management actions reduce potential adverse impacts of climate change and variability on natural protected areas and uses statistically valid experiments to evaluate the efficacy of compensatory management actions. Accordingly, the proposed method is superior to other methods such as safe minimum standard, precautionary principle, minimax regret criterion, scenario planning, and passive adaptive management.

► Climate change and variability threaten natural protected areas. ► Compensatory management actions (CMAs) can alleviate adverse climate impacts. ► A fuzzy multiple attribute-adaptive management method is proposed. ► The method ranks CMAs in multiple time periods within a planning horizon. ► Rankings are used to determine an optimal adaptive management strategy.