Step 4: Plan For Action
Develop an adaptation plan to identify and customize actions that can reduce vulnerability and build resilience to climate change.
Activity 1: SET ADAPTATION GOALS
Articulate long-term goals for adaptation within each planning area to guide the development of adaptation actions.
“Planning for adaptation must necessarily follow and be guided by community goals. For the purposes of this project, the project team was guided by existing goals as contained in documents approved and developed by the Tribal Senate. The primary guiding document is the Swinomish Comprehensive Plan, which addresses goals for all major functions and activities within the Reservation.”
Guiding Questions
Helpful questions to consider during this activity.
Traditional Knowledges
Considerations for integrating and protecting
Traditional Knowledges during this activity.
Tribal Examples
Learn about how different Tribes identified and defined adaptation goals.
Activity 2: IDENTIFY ADAPTATION ACTIONS
Create a list of potential actions that could achieve the adaptation goals for each key concern or planning area.
“What we are seeing on the Owyhee is probably due to less water, but what else? Hot days. It has gotten very hot. Let’s not leave it there…What do we DO about it?”
Guiding Questions
Helpful questions to consider during this activity.
Traditional Knowledges
Considerations for integrating and protecting
Traditional Knowledges during this activity.
After establishing goals, the climate change planning team and others can work together to identify, customize, and refine specific adaptation actions to achieve those goals. An adaptation action is a specific activity that can be implemented in order to achieve adaptation goals. Consider the key factors that influence vulnerability and think about concrete ways to reduce vulnerability by decreasing climate exposure, reducing sensitivity, and increasing adaptive capacity. Building off the best and promising practices from other communities and customizing adaptation actions will allow them to be effective for the community.
The first place to look for ideas for adaptation actions is in the work that the Tribe is already doing. Departments, agencies, and other entities within the Tribe may already be thinking about climate change. Identify any adaptation efforts in existing Tribal plans for natural resources, environmental, cultural, transportation, or other public service sectors. Work already underway, or planned for, likely has the departmental and institutional support and funding to be carried out. It may be a matter of slightly adjusting the inputs, targets, or scope of these efforts to ensure that they help the Tribe prepare for future climate.
The next set of places to look is to other Tribes who have already completed adaptation plans, published and gray literature, federal agencies or partnerships, Traditional Knowledges (TKs), or from the community’s own ingenuity. These actions may need to be customized to align with the Tribe’s priorities, TKs, and co-management responsibilities. For example, an action from the US Forest Service report, Forest Adaptation Resources, that says to maintain or restore riparian areas by “… promoting a diversity of tree and plant species to increase stream shading, provide a source of woody debris, stabilize the soil, and provide habitat and connectivity for wildlife”[3] would ideally be modified to specify which types of trees to plant and where to plant them.
Gather as many adaptation actions as possible from a variety of sources and then refine those actions, making them relevant to the Tribe. When gathering adaptation actions, consider actions within the categories defined in Table 9. Also, the Tribe’s staff, climate change planning team, and community members may come up with new possibilities. The inclusion of TKs within this process has the potential to inform the development of adaptation actions that are better connected to and support the Tribe’s traditional practices and culture.
Table 9. Adaptation Action Categories and Examples
Types of adaptation actions to consider along with a description of those actions and examples of specific actions developed by Tribal communities that fit within those categories.
Create a structure to organize the collected adaptation actions. It may be convenient to organize actions by planning area and associated goals. Actions may also be organized by climate impacts or type of strategy or another method that works for the Tribe. Choose an organizational structure that best helps the Tribe evaluate, customize, and implement actions.
Tribal Examples
Find out more about how Tribes have organized adaptation actions and the types of categories they developed.
Resources
An extensive list of resources is available to support the organization and selection of adaptation actions.
Community Engagement Checkpoint
Engaging with community members, Elders, and Tribal staff beyond the planning team can bring in other expertise, viewpoints, and experience to help the Tribe collect all relevant and useful ideas for adaptation actions.
Activity 3: EVALUATE & PRIORITIZE ACTIONS
Evaluate and prioritize adaptation actions to identify actions the Tribe is likely to implement with success.
“A necessary first task in beginning assessment of potential strategies is scoping the range of possible options. After surveying a variety of resources and discussing the possibilities with the Strategy Advisory Group, a broad array of potential strategies was identified.”
Guiding Questions
Helpful questions to consider during this activity.
Traditional Knowledges
Considerations for integrating and protecting
Traditional Knowledges during this activity.
Selecting which actions to do first requires prioritization. Start by deciding on a selection process and specific evaluation criteria that the climate change planning team can use to prioritize adaptation actions. It is useful to have a mix of criteria that represent a variety of factors that will ultimately determine the success of the actions. Criteria could include (but are not limited to): effectiveness, cost (or cost/benefit), technical feasibility, political feasibility, cultural value, time frame, flexibility, and others.
The evaluation criteria can depend on available resources and the scope and vision of the present effort. For example, if funding or time is limited, the selection process can simply be qualitative (i.e., high, medium, and low categories) assessments, or the planning team can discuss and select actions, or vote on which actions to include in the plan. There are many types of criteria that could be used to evaluate adaptation actions. Table 10 describes some potential criteria, rationale for selecting that criteria, and examples from Tribes who have used the criteria in their adaptation planning process.
Table 10. Types of Criteria for Prioritizing Adaptation Actions.
This table lists general types of criteria that could be used to prioritize and select adaptation actions along with examples of each criteria type.
Tribal Examples
See how different Tribes selected criteria to evaluate adaptation actions.
Once the planning team has agreed upon the evaluation criteria, those criteria can be used to evaluate and select high priority adaptation actions. There are multiple ways to do this. One way is to work through each action and assign a score (e.g., 1 to 3, or 1 to 5) for each criterion for each adaptation action. Actions that score higher could be prioritized for implementation. Some categories, such as cost, may need to be scored in reverse (low cost = 3, high costs = 1) so that the sum adequately helps prioritize lower cost actions if that is a goal for the Tribe.
After evaluating adaptation actions using the selection criteria, the planning team will decide how to rank the actions. There are many ways to do this ranking. The Tribe could, for example, choose the top three adaptation actions based on score, choose to pursue all actions that exceed a minimum scoring threshold, or group actions based on what can be done now or in the future.
Additional Information: Implementing Adaptation Actions.
Read more about one idea for how to group adaptation actions based on the timing of when the actions can be done.
Regardless of the approach taken to evaluate and prioritize adaptation actions, this is a great place in the process to set the foundation for monitoring and evaluating (Step 5) the success of those actions. If ideas about how actions should be monitored or tracked arise in this process, document those ideas so they can be considered and used in Step 5.
Tribal Examples
See how different Tribes used evaluation criteria to prioritize adaptation actions.
Community Engagement Checkpoint
Consider getting community input on the prioritized adaptation actions.
Documentation Checkpoint
Climate change adaptation plans are often living documents that are revised and updated over time. Thus, it is important to keep notes of the Tribe’s choices in this step.
Activity 4: IMPLEMENTATION PLANS
Adaptation actions are more likely to be effective when they have an implementation plan.
“A common pitfall of community-driven planning is that the process stops with the publication of the plan and implementation stalls due to lack of resources and political will.”
Guiding Questions
Helpful questions to consider during this activity.
Traditional Knowledges
Considerations for integrating and protecting
Traditional Knowledges during this activity.
Adaptation actions are most effective when they have a plan for implementation. This means identifying early on who will take the lead on those actions, what it will take for them to be implemented, the opportunities for implementation, and the timeframe for implementation.
An implementation plan creates a road map for each action that can be followed one piece, one sector, or one department at a time. Ask Tribal staff members, community members, and other partners (if applicable) to review the adaptation action text for their individual areas of expertise and ask them to add relevant context, set appropriate targets, and highlight areas of overlap with other existing resources and projects. The implementation plan also creates a framework to track the effectiveness of the selected actions and report to the Tribe and other stakeholders. When creating an implementation plan, consider, at a minimum, the following items:
- Timeframe for action;
- Lead (person, group, department, or agency);
- Partnerships required (if necessary);
- Funding required;
- Indicators of success; and
- Opportunities for mainstreaming with existing department responsibilities and actions.
Resources
Community exercise to help create an implementation plan.
Look for diverse and comprehensive funding sources that can support a wide range of actions, including infrastructure and restoration (see Step 1: Activity 7). To the extent possible, identify when adaptation actions can be integrated into existing departmental operations and management. Mainstreaming adaptation into ongoing efforts can be critical for securing support and funding for implementing these actions. In addition, using an existing structure for tracking the success of the actions makes monitoring and evaluation easier. The Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals highlights this in their Adaptation Toolkit by saying that it is important to “work with each department of the Tribal government to integrate the adaptation plan into ongoing planning and management activities of all Tribal departments. It might be included in other plans such as a natural resource plan, drought management plan, or disaster preparedness plan, etc…The ultimate goal of developing and implementing a climate change adaptation plan is to make your Tribe more resilient to climate change.”[4]
Tribal Examples
See how different Tribes created implementation plans for their adaptation actions.
Activity 5: Sharing the Story of the Tribe’s Adaptation Work
Document and share the process and the products of the Tribe’s adaptation work, while protecting sensitive information, to support continued community engagement and long-term success.
“I cherish my reservation, just because that is where my family is… So, when I think about my position here, I think about managing in a way that they have something in the future to manage themselves.”
Guiding Questions
Helpful questions to consider during this activity.
Traditional Knowledges
Considerations for integrating and protecting
Traditional Knowledges during this activity.
Compiling the work completed in this and previous steps and developing creative ways to share that progress will do three things. First, it will help create a sense of completion and accomplishment for the planning team and others partners. Second, it will provide a centralized set of resources and materials that can be used by the Tribe to support ongoing or future adaptation efforts. Third, sharing these resources will continue to build momentum and support for the implementation of adaptation actions.
Collect and synthesize the products developed over the course of the adaptation planning process. This compilation may include semi-final products (such as the prioritized adaptation actions developed in Step 4: Activity 3), or process documents (such as folders of meeting notes, survey results, and slides from presentations). Once the resources are compiled, the planning team may identify key gaps or decide it is valuable to add additional documents describing the process or the end products.
Look for creative ways to develop outputs of the adaptation planning process that serve a variety of needs and make the results more meaningful to key audiences, such as Tribal leadership, funders, Tribal members, and other partners.
Take a step back from the details of the climate change adaptation process and work with the planning team to identify ways to share the Tribe’s climate resilience story. This may simply mean distilling technical reports into graphically focused summary sheets that can be read by Tribal members who do not have a technical background. It may mean creating content for a weekly radio segment or posts in a Tribal newsletter to share results or continue the resilience dialogue in the community. Or, it may mean investing in the development of a video (or series of videos) that shares the results of the Tribe’s work and can reach an audience that would not be reached through reports or documents. The process used for incorporation of Traditional Knowledges (TKs) can further support the appropriate use of that information in other efforts that benefit the Tribe, such as grants or management practices.
Tribal Examples
USING CREATIVE WAYS TO SHARE CLIMATE INFORMATION
The Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation (USRT) created short summary sheets for key focus species that provided a graphically rich way to share information with the Tribal community on the relative climate change vulnerability of different species.[5]
Tribal Examples
USING VIDEOS TO TELL CLIMATE STORIES
The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and the Puyallup Tribe have used videos to help share their stories about why they are doing adaptation planning. These videos are likely to reach a different and potentially broader audience than a typical written adaptation plan.
For each of the outreach materials or approaches selected, develop a communications plan. To be effective, this plan should include identifying: the audience(s) for this information; how best to reach those audiences; the key messages of the materials; and any desired calls to action. Consult Step 1: Activity 6 to find effective ways to engage and communicate with different audiences within the Tribal community.
These outreach products can also be a great way to celebrate progress on adaptation. While adaptation planning is never truly done, taking time to share the results broadly with, and beyond, the community is a great way to reward the planning team for their hard work and acknowledge all the hard work that has gone into building resilience.
Tribal Examples
DEVELOPING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERSHIP
Many Tribes are working to share their cultural traditions with youth. These teachings and trainings can also help share information about climate change, how it will affect key resources, and what actions can be taken to increase the resilience of those resources.
