The state of climate change research in Swiss protected areas

Abstract

Climate change is a scientific topic rarely addressed in Swiss protected areas. Starting from a survey of the spatial distribution of research projects addressing climate change in protected areas derived from Parkforschung.ch data, this report highlights some of the main issues that climate change science is facing in developing research interest in the field. The sources of information are expert interviews carried on during 2018. Preliminary remarks on the geography of scientific interest and the role of experts Despite its relatively young age, Switzerland’s system of protected areas (PAs) benefits from a notable collection of research records. Topics ranging from the acceptance of PAs by local populations to specific ecological issues are addressed and stored in a thematic catalogue. However, despite being discussed frequently in both science and policy domains, the topic of climate change is seldom addressed as a research theme in PAs (Table 1). In order to shed light on this peculiar situation, a set of semi-structured interviews was organized between January and June 2018. The research design was informed by the notion of epistemic community, defined as a “group of professionals, often from a variety of different disciplines, which produce policy-relevant knowledge about complex technical issues” (Haas 1992, 16). This framework is intended as a way not only to counter data scarcity but also to understand how policy and management-relevant knowledge is formed and how members of the community interact with it. If “ideas would be sterile without carriers” (Haas 1992, 27), then policies and scientific research – or the lack thereof – can be better understood in their complexity by adopting the standpoints of a variety of different actors. This claim proves especially true in the case of conservation, where communities are formed by an assemblage of scientists, practitioners, managers and policymakers (Lorimer 2015). With the purpose of pursuing this goal, the interviewees in our study were initially selected with the help of two experts on research in PAs from the Swiss Academy of Natural Science (ScNat). Those selected were then divided into four groups (Table 2): (1) scientists currently (or in the recent past) conducting a research project on climate change in PAs; (2) research coordinators or members of a research council; (3) conservationists or administrative managers; (4) external social or natural scientists with a particular perspective on, and expertise in, the issue addressed. Expert interviews helped to define some possible explanations for the relative lack of research projects on the topic of climate change in Swiss PAs and to make sense of the scattered geographical pattern that emerged from the available data. Presenting the main topics arising from the interviews, this report is in several sections examining specific points of interest. However, these points should not be considered discrete and independent, but precisely the opposite. Management and scientific issues are intertwined and indeed very difficult to separate. Hence the reader should not be surprised to find resonance between points. Note that the considerations presented here represent the preliminary results of a more extensive analysis. Some obstacles at the science-management interface With the notable exception of the Swiss National Park, Swiss PAs tend to be reactive rather than proactive with regard to climate change monitoring. The most evident indicator of this scientific and management attitude can be seen in the fact that if climate change does not affect – or strongly threaten to affect – some of the conservation objects or goals of an individual PA, or if it is not even addressed by a particular research policy within the PA, the PA’s management do not dedicate any research to the subject. As the interviews highlight, when heavy economic, social and political structures like PAs allocate interest, funding and human resources to a research project, they seldom do so without concrete evidence of a threat towards their core interests. In particular, the young age of the majority of Swiss PAs forces them to focus on monitoring acceptance by local populations, and the effectiveness of their conservation and sustainable development practices. As a direct consequence, Swiss PAs display a rather low rate of participation in international monitoring endeavours in the field of climate change. Even when they are already empirically facing some degree of change, there is a tendency by the PA’s administration to see this as tolerable, as a phenomenon to be addressed in the future. This attitude is mostly explained by the need to ad50 Management & Pol icy Issues Table 1 – Research records divided by PAs and research typology. Source: Parkforschung Schweiz Total research records Research projects Managementoriented projects Permanent / Monitoring projects Dissertations Masters Bachelors Regional Nature Park Beverin 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Binntal 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Biosfera Val Mustair 5 3 1 0 0 1 0 Regional Nature Park Chasseral 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Diemtigtal 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Doubs 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Gantrisch 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Gruyère Pays-d’Enhaut 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Jura Vaudois 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Jurapark Aargau 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Pfyn-Finges 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 Regional Nature Park Schaffhausen 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Regional Nature Park Thal 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage 3 0 0 0 0 2 1 Swiss National Park 13 4 0 3 2 4 0 Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona UNESCO World Heritage 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 UNESCO Biosphere Entlebuch 3 2 0 0 0 1 0 UNESCO Biosphärenreservat Engiadina Val Müstair 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 Wildnispark Zurich 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 Total 30 13 2 3 3 8 1 dress more pressing issues regarding land use, landowning rights, and land concessions. Even if signs of changes in the composition of an ecosystem might be empirically detectable, their relatively low current impact is preventing the formation of keen interest. Moreover, a considerable number of researchers and research coordinators remarked on the high resilience of mountain ecosystems, which are not yet showing evidence of substantial changes. Additionally, some interviewees belonging to categories 2 and 3 highlighted how the physical ability to cope with changes (or the absence of such an ability) is influencing research. Scientific endeavours in PAs ought to include the dimension of applied research. The retreat of a glacier or the upward migration of a particular species, for example, are not perceived as phenomena that can be managed or controlled, and they (probably) do not pose any threat to the integrity of the PA in terms of its natural heritage and infrastructure. By contrast, an increase in the number or intensity of wildfires might be perceived as a physical threat to both. Given the low density of research distribution in the PA system, it is probably safe to assume that climate change is not yet seen as a physical threat to the infrastructure of PAs or to ecosystems. In relation to this last claim, interviews showed a reasonable degree of agreement around the need to gather more information describing the effects of climate change on ecosystems, in order for adaptation measures to be taken. As some interviewees highlighted, there is no evidence available to demonstrate substantial influences of climate change on the structure and function of ecosystems. Hence it is crucial to stimulate new basic research on these topics, in order to enhance the ability to detect actual threats to ecosystems that are deemed worthy of legal protection. This fact resonates with a broader struggle of climate science – to spread effectively the concept of scientific uncertainty within political and administrative domains. Factors hindering research by the scientific community From the point of view of science, the task of organizing and conducting climate change research poses significant challenges. Most of the interviewees belonging to categories 1 and 2 highlighted how the absence of historical series of data constitutes an obstacle for monitoring the development of climate change and its physical and ecological consequences. This is especially true in young PAs, where scientific endeavours might be entirely new. From springs to moorlands, ecological monitoring initiatives suffer from the lack of reference data gathered in the past. Another set of problems addressed in the interviews is directly linked to the problem of scientific uncertainty. Models describing the spatiotemporal evolution of environmental variables are not always available, and even when they are, it can be difficult to provide plausible answers to the questions initially posed. The case of Entlebuch’s moorlands epitomizes both kinds of scientific problems, since it both lacks historical data series on the evolution of moorland 51 Emil iano Tolusso ecosystems and deals with the uncertainty of the future progression of climate change and of its effects, which do not necessarily display a clear relationship. Critical consideration of the spatial and temporal necessities of a hypothetical climate change research project led some of the interviewees to advance the hypothesis of a mismatch in scale between the problems related to climate change and the inquiry capabilities of PAs, in relation both to time and to space. The absence of historical data means that the acquisition of useful information could take decades to show meaningful trends, and the limited geographical scope of the PAs might not be an ideal setting to monitor the development of ecological changes. The result of such a combination of limiting factors is the limited amount of background research available for climate change research and monitoring in almost every PA. The