This series of 4 webinar recordings by Marcia Brown (FOS) and John Morrison (WWF) provides an overview of the Climate-Smart Open Standards. Another good base resource is the National Wildlife Federation’s Climate-Smart Conservation.
Briefly, several adjustments to the Open Standards make them climate-smart (as per table below):
- Initial steps – project scope, vision and targets are defined as usual
- Viability of the targets is defined, but desired future state of the indicators for the key ecological attributes is left until after assessment of climate vulnerability
- Assess direct threats but leave rating them
- Develop climate scenarios and impacts (climate vulnerability)
- Add threats and impacts of climate change to the conceptual model
- Rate direct threats and stresses considering climate vulnerability
- Revisit indicators and develop realistic future states for target goals
- Proceed with Step 2 – develop the plan, taking into account climate change adaptation – ie strategies should be successful even in the face of climate change
