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Climate change is threatening forest ecosystem services, but people who manage their own forestland are in a unique position to observe these threats and take steps to reduce their impacts, especially if they believe that climate change is a contributing factor. We investigate the nature of the relationship between small woodland owner experiences of drought and severe storms and climate change belief in the upper midwestern United States using survey data and structural equation modeling. We find for both events that experience has a modest, positive effect on climate change belief, but only indirectly through perceptions of changing trends in these types of events. In addition, we find that trend perception and climate change belief have an important reciprocal relationship. Our findings suggest that experience as well as cognitive biases are related to believing in climate change, and that greater attention should be given to the potential of bidirectional relationships between key concepts related to climate change belief. Significance Statement: Belief in climate change increases the likelihood of supporting and participating in climate change mitigation actions. We wanted to better understand the relationships between experiencing severe weather events, believing in global climate change, and noticing changes in the local patterns of severe weather events. Using data from a survey of individual and family forestland owners, also known as small woodland owners, in the upper Midwest, we found that severe weather experience increases climate change belief by increasing the perception that severe weather event trends are changing. The nature of this relationship is also important for informing how future analyses are constructed to avoid misleading findings that overestimate the influence that severe weather experience has on climate change belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A small proportion of small woodland owners exhibited adaptation behavior. • A larger proportion of small woodland owners exhibited coping behavior. • The greatest proportion of owners exhibited mixed coping-adaptation behavior. • A theory-grounded regression model explained the adaptation index. • The findings inform how to evaluate adaptation more consistently and coherently. As individuals and households have increasingly suffered the effects of climate change, substantial research has focused on understanding behavioral adaptation, the process of individuals and households responding to climate change to reduce future risk and improve well-being. However, this research is limited by the challenge of evaluating adaptation and differentiating it from coping. The theoretical literature suggests that planned, proactive, and transformative responses are more consistent with the concept of adaptation, while autonomous, reactive, and incremental efforts are more consistent with the concept of coping. We developed an index based on these features for evaluating behavioral responses to climate change in terms of coping and adaptation. We tested the index with a regression model of variables theorized to foster adaptation. Our empirical context was small woodland owners responding to climate change-related stressors (storms, insect and disease outbreaks, winter thaws, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires) by managing their forests in the Northwoods, USA. We found that a small but notable proportion of the owners exhibited behavior more consistent with adaptation than coping. A larger proportion of owners exhibited behavior more consistent with coping than adaptation. The greatest proportion exhibited mixed coping-adaptation behavior, confirming theories that coping and adaptation occur on a continuum, with interplay between the two. We also found the regression model explained how consistent their responses were with adaptation relative to coping. Our findings advance scholarly understanding of behavioral adaptation and how to evaluate it more consistently and coherently. Our findings also enhance practical understanding of how small woodland owners adapt to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are well recognized, and a wide variety of adaptation measures have been proposed. However, little is known about whether and how adaptation is occurring among people in these ecosystems. Understanding adaptation at the level of individuals, including members of households and extended families, is especially important because it is the level at which people most directly experience climate change impacts and engage in behavioral change. I offer a framework for characterizing the responses of individual landowners to climate change impacts in terms of adaptation behavior, and distinguishing adaptation from coping. The framework expands existing typologies of adaptation behavior to include a hierarchy of three analytical units of behavior: activities, practices, and strategies. I illustrate the framework by applying it to landowners' responses to climate change impacts in temperate forests, a biome that is undergoing dramatic change. Individuals own and rely on large proportions of land in many temperate forest countries and are therefore exposed and sensitive to climate change impacts. Through management, they also influence how forests and their own well-being are affected by climate change. By improving characterizations of behavioral responses to climate change, the framework I propose can help researchers and practitioners evaluate progress toward adaptation with greater rigor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • I found evidence of adaptation to climate change among individual forest owners. • Forest owners exhibited autonomous, reactive, and incremental responses. • Forest owners also exhibited planned and proactive responses. • Forest owners sought to transition to new conditions and be resilient to change. • Adaptation research and policy should account for scales of stressors and responses. Abstract A growing body of research documents how individuals respond to local impacts of global climate change and a range of policy efforts aim to help individuals reduce their exposure and improve their livelihoods despite these stressors. Yet there is still limited understanding of how to determine whether and how adaptation is occurring. Through qualitative analysis of focus group interviews, I evaluated individual behavioral responses to local forest stressors that can arguably be linked to global climate change among landowners in the Upper Midwest, USA. I found that landowner responses were planned as well as autonomous, more proactive than reactive, incremental rather than transformational, and aimed at being resilient to change and transitioning to new conditions, rather than resisting change alone. Many of the landowners' responses can be considered forms of adaptation, rather than coping, because they were aimed at moderating and avoiding harm on long time horizons in anticipation of change. These findings stand in contrast to the short-term, reactive, and incremental responses that current socio-psychological theories of adaptation suggest are more typical at the individual level. This study contributes to scientific understanding of how to evaluate behavioral adaptation to climate change and differentiate it from coping, which is necessary for developing conceptually rigorous analytical frameworks to guide research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation to climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing coastal communities today. Coastal communities are subject to a wide range of stressors related to climate change, including biological resource decline and natural hazards. Small historically natural-resource-dependent communities are particularly vulnerable because of their close reliance on ecosystem goods and services that are likely to be affected by climate change (e.g., fisheries, forests) and their limited access to outside technical and financial resources needed for adaptation. Exogenous adaptation policies, while helpful for fostering new behavioral adjustments to address resource decline and natural hazards, can in some cases exacerbate socioeconomic disruption, further burdening communities already struggling to adapt. This paper presents an investigation of how six historically natural-resource-dependent coastal communities in Oregon, USA, have experienced and responded to external stressors and how adaptation in these communities has been shaped by interactions between past and present practices, processes, and vulnerabilities. Despite climate-related impacts identified by the scientific community, climate change was not salient in the community members’ reports of stressors and impacts, and thus was not a trigger of adaptation. Rather, communities were responding to stressors associated with decades of declines in natural resource industries, an economic recession, restrictive natural resource management and land use policies, demographic change, and natural hazards. These findings confirm other research findings that chronic everyday problems, including those related to the maintenance of livelihoods, or consequences of inadequate livelihoods, often eclipse potentially disastrous threats in the minds of rural community members, thereby influencing adaptation strategies. In some cases communities do not prioritize such threats because people have come to accept living with them, or they feel powerless and unable to change the circumstances of daily life. The findings improve understanding of adaptation in natural-resource-based coastal communities in the USA and support the need for policy makers and planners to integrate climate change adaptation into livelihood improvement strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems. We developed a framework that measures social vulnerability to slow-onset climate-related changes in forest ecosystems. We focused on temperate forests because this biome is expected to experience dramatic change in the coming years, with adverse effects for humans. We advance climate change vulnerability science by making improvements to measures of exposure and sensitivity and by incorporating a measure of adaptive capacity. We improved on other methods of assessing exposure by incorporating climate change model projections and thus a temporal perspective. We improved on other methods of assessing sensitivity by incorporating a variable representing interdependency between human populations and forests. We incorporated a measure of adaptive capacity to account for ways socioeconomic conditions might mitigate exposure and sensitivity. Our geographic focus was the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. We found that fifteen of the region's seventy-five counties were highly vulnerable to climate-related changes due to some combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Nine counties were highly vulnerable because they ranked very high in terms of exposure and sensitivity and very low in terms of adaptive capacity. The framework we developed could be useful for investigations of vulnerability to climate change in other forested contexts and in other ecological contexts where slow-onset changes might be expected under future climate conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public land management agencies have incorporated the concept of vulnerability into protocols for assessing and planning for climate change impacts on public forests and grasslands. However, resource managers and planners have little guidance for how to address the social aspects of vulnerability in these assessments and plans. Failure to assess social vulnerability to climate change during management planning could compromise land management agencies' adaptation strategies as well as public support for these strategies. We provide a framework for understanding and assessing social vulnerability to climate change in US public lands contexts. We describe types of information that can be used in social vulnerability assessments and ways this information can be gathered. The practical information that we provide is intended to help resource managers and planners meet current policy requirements for assessing potential impacts of climate change across diverse local social and ecological conditions for which one-size-fits-all approaches are not likely to be useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between climate change and increased wildfire risk highlights the need for adaptation in wildfire‐prone landscapes. While extensive research has focused on adaptation at the levels of communities, policies, and governance systems, there is limited understanding of adaptation at the level of individual behavioral responses. Individuals not only directly experience the adverse effects of wildfires but also shape their own exposure to wildfire through risk mitigation practices. Without knowledge of whether these behaviors are adaptive, decision makers are limited in their ability to design and assess climate change adaptation policies that improve outcomes in wildfire‐prone regions. Likewise, greater understanding of the processes by which behavioral adaptation occurs can improve theories of behavior under risk, and specifically how psychological and social factors mediate the effects of hazard conditions on behavior. This paper reviews scholarship on biophysical, psychological, and social factors that shape behavioral adaptation to climate change in wildfire‐prone forests. Our review highlights opportunities to improve theory and assist risk mitigation policy interventions by focusing greater attention on dynamic feedbacks involving hazards, behavior, and outcomes, as well as accounting for variation in behavior and wildfire hazard conditions. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation The increasing intensity of wildfires highlights the importance of understanding the factors responsible for adaptation of risk mitigation behavior. Credit: U.S. Forest Service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]