The Intersection of Regional and Local Uncertainties in Participatory Scenario Planning for Public Lands Management: the Cienega Watershed, Arizona

Land managers and communities struggle to sustain natural landscapes and the benefits they provide--especially in an era of rapid and unpredictable changes being driven by shifts in climate and other drivers that are largely outside the control of local managers and residents. The Cienega Watershed Partnership (CWP) is a long-standing multi-agency partnership involved in managing lands and resources over about 700,000 acres in southeast Arizona, surrounding the Bureau of Land Management's Las Cienegas National Conservation Area. The region forms a vital wildlife corridor connecting the diverse ecosystems of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and grasslands with the Sierra Madrean and Rocky Mountain forests and woodlands. The CWP has long-standing forums and relationships for considering complex issues and novel approaches for management, including practical implementation of adaptive management, development of monitoring programs and protocols, and the use of nested objectives to adjust management targets. However, current plans have objectives and strategies based on what is known or likely to become known about natural and socio-cultural systems; they do not incorporate uncertainties related to rapid changes in climate or have well developed feedback mechanisms for routinely reconsidering climate information. Since 2011, more than 50 individuals from over 20 federal and local governments, non-governmental organizations, and private landowners have participated in scenario planning for the Cienega Watershed. This project aims extends the general National Park Service scenario planning approach to increase its utility to field managers; organize and assess many adaptation options within portfolios that reflect multiple futures, situational dependencies, and contingent or even conflicting options; explicitly link portfolio implementation to monitoring and modeling of key indicators and triggers; and supports public planning processes. Project tasks are structured around four resource teams that focus on their specific management concerns (Montane, Riparian, Upland and Cultural), but that come together periodically to consider interaction and conflict among their scenarios or prospective adaptation. A training workshop prepared team leaders to develop, with their teams, the management-relevant scenario narratives that incorporate climate change and other key external forces. At a subsequent workshop, each team independently identified their specific resource management issues, shared understanding about external drivers of change and their impacts on Cienega resources, and developed rudimentary scenario narratives. Each team expanded and refined their basic narratives, combined with three regional climate narratives, into more detailed forms over the following two months. The regional climate narratives were developed using a similar workshop process that engaged climate and impacts scientists from the Climate Assessment of the Southwest (CLIMAS). Participants are finding that embracing uncertainty enables them to approach climate change with a sense of empowerment rather than a sense of reacting to crises, and they appreciate the methods and opportunities for thinking differently and crossing boundaries that the scenario planning exercises provide.