This webinar originally aired on 4 December 2012.
Rising sea levels coupled with population growth along coasts make climate adaptation planning an imperative. The framework of ecosystem services can help managers understand how alternative management and climate scenarios are likely to affect a broad range of services delivered to people from coastal ecosystems. To support planners and decision-makers in their efforts to manage natural resources in the face of a changing climate, The Natural Capital Project is developing methods to incorporate ecosystem services into climate adaptation planning. To accomplish this, we are applying the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) ecosystem service accounting tool, building new tools that evaluate vulnerability of coastal ecosystems to climate change and the capacity for ecosystems to adapt, and working to integrate our tools with other existing tools (e.g., The Nature Conservancy’s Coastal Resilience tool, the CSC NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer, SLAMM). In parallel, we are working directly with planners and decision-makers in various contexts to inform climate adaptation planning and to ensure that the tools we develop are useful in the real world. In this webinar we will present results from several on-the-ground applications (e.g. California, Texas), introduce our tools, and have an open discussion about additional ways to incorporate climate information into planning. Learn more about the Natural Capital Project here: naturalcapitalproject.org and more about InVEST here: naturalcapitalproject.org/models/models.html.
This webinar was cosponsored by the EBM Tools Network, and it was presented by Suzanne Langridge of The Natural Capital Project.