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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]