Development and Use of Climate Scenarios for Natural Resource Management in Southwestern Colorado

Imtiaz Rangwala (1,2), Renee Rondeau (3), Carina Wyborn (4) and Katie Clifford (5)

Abstract
Locally relevant projections of climate change provide critical insights for natural resource managers seeking to adapt their management activities to climate change. To provide such information, we developed narrative scenarios of future climate change and its impacts on different ecosystems in southwestern Colorado. This multi-institution and trans-disciplinary project seeks to provide useful and useable knowledge to facilitate climate change adaptation in the context of uncertainty. The narratives are intended to provide detailed insights into the range of changes that natural resource managers may face in the future. These scenarios were developed in an iterative process through interactions between ecologists, social and climate scientists. In our scenario development process, climate uncertainty is acknowledged by having multiple scenarios, where each scenario is regarded as a storyline with equal likelihood as another scenario. We quantified changes in several decision relevant climate and ecological responses based on our best available understanding and provided a tight storyline for each scenario to facilitate (a) a more augmented use of scientific information in a decision-making process, (b) differential responses from stakeholders across the different scenarios, and (c) identification of strategies that could work across these multiple scenarios. This presentation will discuss the process of selecting the scenarios, quantifying climate and ecological responses, and the criteria for building the narrative for each scenario. We will cover the process by which these scenarios get used, and some assessments of their effectiveness and users’ feedbacks that could inform the future development of these tools and processes.