During the first decade of the millennium, conservation practice predominantly focused on resisting changes and maintaining historical or current conditions, but the ever-increasing impacts from climate change have recently highlighted the need for some degree of transformative action. Despite the intensifying calls for transformation, little empirical evidence exists on what types of adaptation actions are happening in practice, let alone how transformative these actions are. Frameworks and typologies have been proposed to synthesise and organize adaptation strategies, but they tend to be broad, ambiguous, and difficult to operationalize in practice. In response, we developed a novel typology¾the R-R-T scale¾a six-point continuous scale, ranging from active resistance to accelerated transformation, that reduces linguistic uncertainty, provides finer resolutions and is more conducive to the empirical analysis of trends of adaptation strategies. We present and the trial the R-R-T scale by assessing through content analysis the full proposals of 104 adaptation projects funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Climate Adaptation Fund in the United States between 2011 and 2019. By doing so, we address two research objectives: (1) we empirically assess the value and feasibility or our typology, and (2) we identify emerging trends in the field of conservation in terms of what types of adaptation strategies have been funded and implemented, and how do these adaptation strategies change over time and vary between ecosystems.
Results/Conclusions
Our results, when applying the R-R-T scale to the portfolio of projects, reveal that earlier projects were more likely to resist changes, whereas more recent approaches manage for changes. In particular, we found a demarcation between adaptation projects funded during 2011-2016, which lean towards the resistance-resilience end of the R-R-T scale (61% of projects), and the projects funded afterwards that are more inclined towards some level of transformation (64% of projects). We also found that the level of transformation did differ by ecosystems, with a significantly higher proportion in forest (64%), coastal aquatic (62%) and urban/suburban (58%) ecosystems compared to inland aquatic ecosystems (32%). Our analysis suggests that the call for a revision of conservation norms away from the traditional and place-based focus on existing or historical assemblages is starting to unfold in practice, as conservation practitioners—at least those directly involved with adaptation—increasingly recognize the challenges of maintaining past conditions under future climate.