Managing natural resource systems like fisheries and forests often requires making choices under considerable uncertainty about how their ecological and socio-economic components behave and interact, and thus how they will respond to management.
The Uncertain, the Unexpected, and the Unknown
Here, ‘uncertainty’ includes the uncertain, the unexpected and the unknown. The ‘uncertain’ includes known, but poorly understood factors, for example, scarce data may result in poorly estimated parameters for management models. The ‘unexpected’ refers to unexpected events like sudden shifts in ocean or economic conditions. The ‘unknown’ means we just don’t know what we don’t know, so important factors can be left out of consideration during the decision making process.
Ignoring Uncertainty can have Serious Consequences
Each managed system is subject to some combination of these uncertainties; ignoring uncertainty can have serious consequences. For example, a fishery manager may choose the ‘best’ harvest rate using a fishery model with parameters estimated from historical fish abundance data. However, if these data do not extend far enough back to capture periodic, natural, shifts in fish abundance, the rate may be too high, leading to overharvest, a collapsed fishery, and a failed industry.
Adaptive Management is a Tool Resource Managers Can Use to Design Management Choices
Adaptive management is a ‘tool’ resource managers can use to design choices that explicitly account for the various forms for uncertainty. It allows managers to “embrace uncertainty” and use their management choices as experiments to learn how ecological and socio-economic systems interact and respond to them. This improves future choices, reduces the chance of bad outcomes, and provides ‘insurance’ against unexpected events. This is why adaptive management has been called “learning by doing”.
Adaptive Management is a Rigorous Process for Designing Management Choices as Experiments
As a concept, adaptive management makes good sense, but in reality, designing an adaptive management program is a scientific, social and economic challenge. One reason is that such programs must focus on answering the key questions important to managers, not purely scientific questions, though the two categories may overlap. Another reason is that these questions require work at large-spatial areas and over long periods of time, which requires cooperation amongst multiple jurisdictions and stakeholders.
Keeping the focus on key questions during the design stages may require participation from professionals in many disciplines, the input of managers and policy-makers with different, often conflicting, objectives. Thus it is important to have the guidance of expert facilitators to elicit, integrate and synthesize the information necessary for design.
The Adaptive Management Cycle Focuses Program Design on Key Management Questions
By following the ‘adaptive management cycle’, practitioners can ensure that learning is focused on management needs and that new knowledge feeds back to revise future management choices. The cycle progresses through rigorous system assessment and model construction, development of explicit management hypotheses, experimental design, implementation of management choices, monitoring of their impacts, evaluation of the resulting data, and finally, revision of management choices based upon new knowledge.
Useful References on Adaptive Management
The scientific literature provides many applied examples of adaptive management literature; however, the three references below provide an excellent foundation for those interested in moving from the generalities to the specifics of adaptive management. One or more of these resources is likely to be cited in any scientific paper on adaptive management.
- Holling, C.S. ed. 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, USA.
- Walters, C.J. 1986. Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. Macmillan, New York, NY, USA.
- Lee, K.N. 1999. Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating science and politics for the environment. Island Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
 |
