Mastering risk for resource managers

Dr. David Cleaves on the USDA blog: We face multiple risks every day as resource managers. We are pretty good at intuitively understanding the likelihoods of different hazards, the uncertainties around them, and their potential impacts on the resources we value, and we use this understanding in our resource management decisions. But the risks we manage are rapidly changing with the climate. Sustainability can no longer presume stationarity. To sustain the benefits of our forests and grasslands, our risk management approach itself must adapt to changing means and extremes. We may have to become even better at the techniques and principles of risk management. Our experience and intuition will only take us so far in a rapidly changing world.

...Climate change has brought new wrinkles to risk management. Climate does not act alone. It is a mega-stressor that drives other stressors such as fire, pests, and floods, and interacts with many non-climatic stressors such as land use conversion, invasives introduction and spread, energy development, human recreation, and others. It also couples stressors into more complex and formidable forces on the landscape, creates more complicated pathways for exposure, and stretches the extreme conditions beyond our imagination...