Is 'Resilience' Maladaptive? Towards an Accurate Lexicon for Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

Climate change adaptation is a rapidly evolving field in conservation biology and includes a range of strategies from resisting to actively directing change on the landscape. The term 'climate change resilience,' frequently used to characterize adaptation strategies, deserves closer scrutiny because it is ambiguous, often misunderstood, and difficult to apply consistently across disciplines and spatial and temporal scales to support conservation efforts. Current definitions of resilience encompass all aspects of adaptation from resisting and absorbing change to reorganizing and transforming in response to climate change. However, many stakeholders are unfamiliar with this spectrum of definitions and assume the more common meaning of returning to a previous state after a disturbance. Climate change, however, is unrelenting and intensifying, characterized by both directional shifts in baseline conditions and increasing variability in extreme events. This ongoing change means that scientific understanding and management responses must develop concurrently, iteratively, and collaboratively, in a science-management partnership. Divergent concepts of climate change resilience impede cross-jurisdictional adaptation efforts and complicate use of adaptive management frameworks. Climate change adaptation practitioners require clear terminology to articulate management strategies and the inherent tradeoffs involved in adaptation. Language that distinguishes among strategies that seek to resist change, accommodate change, and direct change (i.e., persistence, autonomous change, and directed change) is prerequisite to clear communication about climate change adaptation goals and management intentions in conservation areas.

Keywords: Conservation planning; Global change; Landscape conservation; Natural resources; Protected area management.

Fig. 1

Recent (past 10–30 years) mean temperature relative to the historical range of variability (1901–2012) in 289 U.S. national parks (park plus surrounding landscape—30-km buffer). Park temperature is considered extreme if one or more of seven temperature variables examined is <5th percentile (‘Cold’) or >95th percentile (‘Warm’) of the historical distribution (adapted from Monahan and Fisichelli 2014)

Fig. 2

Number of English-language peer-reviewed scientific articles since 2000 in an academic citation index (Web of Science^® Science Citation Index Expanded) that contain both the words “climate change” and either “resilience,” “resistance,” or “transformation” or “facilitation”

Fig. 3

Climate change adaptation projects for conservation areas vary along a continuum of adaptation strategies. Appropriate options will vary over time, across space, and among resources