U.S. Geological Survey Grant Opportunity for Climate Adaptation Plans in Southwestern Colorado

USGS needs assistance in piloting and evaluating an integrated adaptation planning framework building on the strengths of iterative scenario building, climate modeling, and institutional analysis, to produce actionable climate adaptation plans for southwestern Colorado. The objective of this work is to facilitate climate change adaptation that contributes to social-ecological resilience, ecosystem and species conservation, and sustainable human communities in southwestern Colorado. This will allow the USGS Fort Collins Science Center to provide necessary information to the USGS North Central Climate Center (NC CSC) to disseminate and implement adaptation plans. At present the USGS is limited in its ability to develop a process for transferring the lessons learned from this project to stakeholders. Developing this process will enable capacity building, so that stakeholders will have the opportunity to construct plans independently in the future. In the end the USGS will have an improved understanding of the process for writing functional adaption plans and be able to provide the adaptation plans to the NC CSC.

Both USGS and MSI will benefit from this collaboration in terms of enhancing both groups’ capability to develop and climate change adaption data. The results will facilitate more comprehensive public land management decisions taking to account social science dimensions of climate change adaptation. This joint research will also provide public land managers and scientists with foundational data to apply in public land management decision making in contexts other than southwestern Colorado.
From the outset of our project, we committed to an ambitious goal of developing adaptation plans for four conservation targets, coordinating two efforts across geographically isolated communities, and engaging two tribes. We additionally strove to integrate the disciplines and practices of social, ecological, and climate sciences. While SECR has completed nine of our eleven deliverables, we have recognized a need for additional funding to complete one of our original deliverables and to add a new task to transfer the learning and methods of our project to additional adaptation efforts. While we are largely successful and on budget, we have been challenged by: (1) the significant distances between our research team which has required additional time/travel to coordinate our efforts; (2) coordination of the process across the two geographically isolated watersheds; (3) changes in federal and tribal staff requiring additional orientation and organizing in the San Juan Basin.
We have recognized an opportunity to utilize the interest in the SECR and NC CSC partnership to develop the workshop materials to replicate the process in partner groups and test the applicability of the process. We have been approached by three watershed groups asking for the SECR team to apply the process to specific watershed problems: Mancos River Watershed Plan update for resilient restoration; San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership for climate-smart wildfire risk reduction; and the Upper Dolores River Cold Water Fish vulnerability assessment.