Third annual Water Law, Policy and Science Conference
Adaptive Management for Resilient Water Resources
Nebraska City’s Lied Lodge and Conference Center
May 4-5, 2006
By Charles Flowerday
Editor/Communications Coordinator
UNL School of Natural Resources
Sometimes a policy is a legally binding agreement. Sometimes, in an approach to natural resources policy called “adaptive management,” it is a hypothesis, an experimental dynamic that helps people plan amid uncertainty.
Dealing effectively with environmental change and the resilience of policy systems is at the center of adaptive management. It was the focus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s third annual Water Law, Policy and Science Conference, May 4-5 at the Lied Lodge, Nebraska City.
Sponsored by UNL, UNL’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Water Center, School of Natural Resources, colleges of Law and Journalism, Water Resources Research Initiative and Department of Geosciences, “Adaptive Management for Resilient Water Resources” featured international, national and regional experts discussing a range of topics related to better managing water systems and natural resources.
Adaptive management (AM) has emerged in the last 20 years as a prominent mans of dealing with complex resource issues involving non-linear systems and multiple tradeoffs. It focuses on uncertainty and resilience in social and ecological systems and tries to turn these factors into advantages, or at least work with, not against them.
Keynoter Lance Gunderson, professor of environmental studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. noted, "Humans for thousands of years have intervened in ecosystems. As we intervene, they change in ways we are essentially unable to predict. Our attempts to stabilize these systems (actually) lead to dramatic changes in ecology."
Gunderson listed AM’s key characteristics: filling the knowledge-to-action gap, often with action; highlighting uncertainties versus ignoring or planning them away; learning while doing versus learning before doing; integrative science, including social science, versus piecemeal science; policy as hypothesis; management actions as weak experimental treatments; and safe-to-fail versus fail-safe approaches.
The last three strategies in particular distinguish AM from more linear, problem-solving management. Its practitioners expect the policy process to be flexible enough to experiment with incremental changes, and then adjust when the results of those experiments become evident, Gunderson said.
He also contrasted passive AM with a more active variety. Passive AM wants to successively update and evaluate policy; its actions relate to the system’s present state and historical constraints; it tries to resolve uncertainties; and it can fail due to conservatism in face of uncertainty.
Active AM involves deliberate experimentation; trade-offs between objectives and learning; and; and a design that can control actions and separate factors.
Gunderson noted that AM has been tried with the Columbia River; the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; the Colorado River and the U.S. waterfowl harvest. He also noted that it helped inform a change in management of the Florida Everglades but has suffered there from paralysis by analysis. More than 10 years of study and dialogue have not resulted in new management trials.
Karina Schoengold, assistant professor of environmental economics, UNL Department of Agricultural Economics and School of Natural Resources, said, “Adaptive management recognizes that there are multiple management options in natural resources, and that there are tradeoffs in choosing a particular strategy.”
One of the promising aspects of AM, she added, has to do with the importance of input from all stakeholders, including local people; this input helps define an environmental management choice between multiple alternatives. Another is the analysis of marginal changes such as the difference between two different flow rates below a reservoir.
Schoengold listed three kinds of environmental decisions that have different economic implications: easily reversible, such as an increase in dam releases; reversible but very costly, such as building a new, large dam – or decommissioning one and restoring river habitat; and irreversible, such as depletion of groundwater and extinction of species. AM is most useful with the first type, and the latter two should be approached with caution. Combining economics with AM can provide guidance about when to make such decisions, she said.
A panel responded to the morning’s presentations. Mike Drain, Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, said AM, in its broadest sense, applies to anything that includes feedback, from workplace projects, to dress and hairstyles. He voiced some reservations: “I am suspicious that in some instances the focus on adaptive management is an effort, or a hope, of finding a technical solution when perhaps a technical solution doesn’t always exist.”
It may not help resolve problems among different sets of values, he explained.
Mike Jess, associate director of the UNL Water Center and former director of Nebraska's Department of Water Resources, said AM involves principles the private sector adopted long ago: if something doesn’t sell, pull it.
"I think people, generally, want to accommodate one another. After all, that’s what adaptive management is – attempting to find some sort of middle ground for all of us.” he added.
One of the hard lessons of AM for the public sector may be that governments have to give up some level of equity or control. Speaking from his experience in state government, Jess said it can be difficult for elected officials to share water management. The Missouri River is a classic example, involving 10 states and many sovereign American Indian tribes. Another challenge relates to compacts that cement agreements on water allocations: how to get the law to adapt to social or ecological changes?
Steven Light of Adaptive Strategies, a consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn., said, “Adaptive management is the most profound change in water or natural resource history in the last 100 years. It’s going to take another 20 years to roll out. I want to see somebody step up to the plate, a university that’s willing to take on adaptive management resilience, and lead the country, and (even) lead internationally in this area.” He challenged UNL to be that university.
Among other comments, he noted that AM is about collective learning; it requires an ecological, not engineering, design; and it treats action a way of knowing. He added that we need to move from seeing water as an enemy or victim to seeing it as an ally.
