Climate-Smart Conservation Standards Webinars (2018)

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