Determining Enabling Environments for Climate Adaptation in Natural Resource Management

Natural resource professionals are on the front lines of climate change and uniquely situated to understand the lands where they work. Analyzing the impacts of learning tools designed to build adaptive capacity within the natural resource management field can offer insights into an enabling environment for climate change adaptation. Through interviews with 35 professionals across multiple landownerships and disciplines (e.g., forestry, habitat restoration, wildlife specialists), we identified the challenges and enablers they faced when applying lessons from the Climate Change Response Framework's Adaptation Planning and Practices courses to their local context. Participants identified many challenges, including, but not limited to, financial (e.g., cost of materials and labor), operational (e.g., temporal mismatches between adaptation plans and ecological realities), and governance conditions (e.g., inconsistent prioritization of climate change). Enablers included the importance of communication through strengthened social networks for enhancing public receptivity to adaptation activities, and the role of multi-scale congruence in better vertical policy alignment and horizontal coordination. We contextualize our findings with institutional innovation from environmental governance literature and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conceptualizations of enabling conditions. We offer an updated framework for viewing adaptation from a more localized yet translatable natural resource management perspective. We promote the continued testing, development, and discussion of sector-specific and practitioner-derived enabling environments for adaptation.