Climate change will have profound impacts on both the human and natural communities of Cascadia, from declining snowpack and increasing wildfire to shifting habitat availability for native species. The scale and pace of these changes will require a historic effort by public and private partners to identify and implement actions that will help human and natural communities adapt. The identification of a shared regional climate adaptation strategy for directing independent and collaborative efforts will be critical to ensuring a sustainable and biodiverse Cascadia into the future.

Achieving climate resilience at the scale of Cascadia requires a complementary suite of enabling conditions to be in place, each of which is individually necessary but not sufficient for successful adaptation: capacity, coordination, motivation, authority, and funding. The Strategy identifies climate adaptation actions supporting each of the five key enabling conditions, organized into a suite of overarching strategies for the whole landscape as well as two, initial conservation targets identified as priorities for the Cascadia Partner Forum: salmonids and carnivores.

In developing the Blueprint, the Core Team facilitated a transparent and inclusive co-production process that engaged regional land and wildlife managers, policy-makers, scientists and other conservation stakeholders. Together, the Team evaluated a suite of regional priorities to identify barriers and opportunities for promoting the five enabling conditions.

The Blueprint is being developed comprehensively but delivered in phases. This process will result in a collaborative, living climate adaptation strategy at the regional scale. The process of building and sharing these pieces is as important as the product.

The first phase of the project, which included developing the Resilient Cascadia Action Library and the Blueprint for whole landscapes, salmonids and carnivores, was completed in January 2022.

The Core Team convened three working groups in early March 2021 as part of the Pilot phase. One working group took a “whole landscape” approach to addressing the five enabling conditions, using an overarching, structural perspective. Two working groups focusing on Carnivores and Salmonids took a “bottom-up” approach using a species-specific perspective. Each working group included members with relevant expertise in Western and Indigenous knowledge and practices. Through monthly workshops, complemented by individual work between workshops, the working groups identified adaptation actions that address regional climate impacts by supporting the five enabling conditions for resilience.

The Partner Forum held a webinar to share the Blueprint. A recording of the webinar is available.

The Blueprint is broken into six strategies that, taken together, contribute to developing the capacity, coordination, motivation, authority, and funding critical for transboundary climate adaptation. The six strategies are:

1. Establish a formal governance structure to facilitate strategic and coordinated large-landscape climate resilience across political boundaries.
2. Center Indigenous leadership, sovereignty and values in all aspects of transboundary, large-landscape climate resilience efforts to promote reconciliation and long-term success.
3. Mainstream transboundary connectivity conservation and climate adaptation into existing decision-making structures to ensure implementation.
4. Conduct joint assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of transboundary, large-landscape climate resilience to support coordinated adaptive management towards socio-ecological goals.
5. Invest in the relationship-building required to build the social capital, political commitment and public support for transboundary large-landscape climate resilience.
6. Establish a sustainable funding model to support the strategic coordination, planning, implementation and monitoring of timely transboundary climate resilience efforts at scale.

The Cascadia Partner Forum adopted five, overarching principles for its engagement with Indigenous governments, organizations and community members throughout development and implementation of the Blueprint for a Resilient Cascadia. The five principles are:

1. Responsibility. We are responsible for the content and character of our relationships. We meet our commitments.
2. Reciprocity. We ensure that we are always bringing value to Tribes and First Nations.
3. Relevance. Our work will be considered in relationship to tribal priorities, as well as our own. We will always work on building collective relevance
4. Relationality. We commit long-term to the development of mutually beneficial relationships.
5. Funding. Funding may be required to engage with Tribes and First Nation

Identifying Riparian Climate Corridors to Inform Climate Adaptation Planning. We created a system to rank habitats along rivers and streams based on the likelihood that they would be relatively protected from climate change and would promote the ability of species to move across the landscape to more suitable habitats as the climate changes.

The Washington-British Columbia Transboundary Climate-Connectivity Project. Scientists and land and wildlife managers collaborated to identify potential climate change impacts and adaptation actions for wildlife habitat connectivity in the transboundary region of Washington and British Columbia. They produced an overview report of their findings; detailed appendices for case studies of eleven species, a vegetation system and a region; and a suite of datasets and visualizations. These products are designed to increase practitioners’ capacity to access, interpret and apply existing climate and connectivity models to their decision-making.

Sage-grouse Habitat and Connectivity in a Changing Landscape and Climate. We developed and validated models of habitat suitability and habitat connectivity for greater sage-grouse in the Columbia Basin of eastern Washington. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and other state and federal agencies and tribes in the region are using these models to predict where the best remaining habitat is for this species given the current landscape and climate, and to consider alternative management scenarios.