title: Marine and coastal ecosystem-based adaptation
Creators: name: Giffin, Alyssa L
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: climate adaptation
subject: coastal ecosystems
subject: ecosystems services

description: The adverse effects of climate change are already impacting millions of people worldwide, particularly those that depend on marine and coastal ecosystems. In response, climate adaptation actions are needed, alongside existing climate mitigation activities, to increase human resilience to these climate impacts. Adaptation projects using ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) are increasingly common, implemented through targeted conservation, management, and restoration activities that use biodiversity and ecosystem services to assist people with adapting to climate change. Since its inception, the major focus of EbA has been on conceptualising the approach and encouraging its use rather than implementation in practice. With EbA now widely promoted within international governing bodies and non-government organisations, and in national adaptation plans, there is a need to better understand marine and coastal EbA in practice and develop tools to support planning, implementation, and monitoring of applied marine and coastal EbA actions. The overarching aim of this thesis is to assist in bridging the implementation gap between policy and practice for marine and coastal EbA. Chapter 1 introduces EbA and explores gaps in knowledge and limits to implementation. Chapter 2 is a review of marine and coastal EbA and its integration with existing ecosystem-based management (EBM) approaches. The chapter clarifies some of the uncertainties as to why and how marine and coastal EbA is being applied and synthesises case studies of integrated EbA and EBM. Chapters 3 and 4 develop decision support tools to guide marine and coastal EbA planning, incorporating elements of EBM approaches. Chapter 3 explores different national-scale approaches to prioritising EbA actions that promote community resilience to extreme cyclones. The chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring different prioritisation approaches, ecosystem diversity and socio-ecological objectives during EbA decision-making, as different combinations of these variables can result in spatially variable outcomes of costs and ecosystem service benefits to communities. Chapter 4 develops a land-sea prioritisation framework to design marine protected and conserved areas (MPCAs) that incorporate the effect of sediment-run-off during cyclone events on coral condition. The chapter demonstrates that there are trade-offs in incorporating cyclone risk in MPCA design, such as higher opportunity losses to achieve greater certainty of coral being in good condition when under threat. Chapter 5 develops a statistical power analysis to guide the monitoring and evaluation of coral reef restoration on a small scale typical of EbA projects. The chapter demonstrates that the ability to detect a true effect of reef restoration can be increased through surveying multiple degraded and healthy control sites, and that the specific number of sites required varies based on the socio-ecological outcome targeted, type of control site, and effect size. Chapter 6 discusses thesis impacts and limitations and provides direction for future research to support marine and coastal EbA implementation.