Climate change presents a novel and significant threat to the sustainability of forest ecosystems worldwide. The United States Forest Service (USFS) has conducted climate change vulnerability assessments for much of the 193 million acres of national forest lands it manages, yet little to no research exists on the degree to which management units have adopted considerations of climate change into planning or project implementation. In response to this knowledge gap, we piloted a survey instrument in USFS Region 1 (Northern region) and Region 6 (Pacific Northwest region) to determine criteria for assessing the degree to which national forests integrate climate-change considerations into their management planning and activities. Our resulting climate-change adaptation index provides an efficient quantitative approach for identifying where, how, and, potentially, why some national forests are making more progress toward incorporating climate-change adaptations into forest planning and management. Study Implications: We used a self-assessment survey of planners and managers on US National Forests in Forest Service Regions 1 and 6 to design a climate change adaptation index for measuring the degree to which national forests units have integrated considerations of climate change into their planning and management activities. Our resulting index can potentially be used to help understand how and why the USFS's decentralized climate-change adaptation strategy has led some national forests to make comparatively significant progress towards adapting to climate change while others have lagged behind.
Coughlan, MR; Huber-Stearns, H; Schultz, C
Piloting a Climate-Change Adaptation Index on US National Forest Lands
Journal Of Forestry