updated. Many self-governance tribes have their own regulations and authorities. Without uniform guidance it is difficult to pass successful adaptations and lessons to new staff or share them with other tribes. Without clear guidance on climate-informed practice, participation in landscape scale partnerships is more difficult. Shared Stewardship, TFPA, GNA, and other programs are conceivably useful tools in applying landscape scale adaptive strategies and dealing with climate-driven disturbances, but successful implementation depends on close alignment on environmental disclosure standards among members of any such partnerships. Differences can become barriers to landscape level collaboration. Process and paperwork burdens as well as exposure to appeals and litigation that can slow or discourage joint activity.
historical range of variability (HRV), 10-yr or longer planning cycles, plans revision triggers, and other structures they try to adjust and create new approaches to planning and managing. Tribes need guidance and mechanisms for testing, accumulating, and disseminating adjustments and innovations. This is a period of widespread wildlife, biodiversity, and related resource areas. Innovation as an important element of adaptive capacity is enhanced by sharing of new approaches and lessons learned, but without leadership affirmation and opportunities for connecting, many of these lessons are likely to be lost and never even considered for wider distribution. For example, IFMAT IV observed a number of changes being made by individual tribes in the eastern US in harvest and treatment timing and placement. The adjustments are being made to reduce invasives, accommodate regeneration, and avoid erosion and sediment that was being made more difficult and less effective because of uncertain snow cover. There were no guidelines at the national level to back up or challenge these changes, little available assistance from technical specialists and scientists, and no uniform way of sharing these experiences with other tribes who might want to try and perhaps adopt them. From the planning and operations perspectives, some tribes have experimenting in forest practices as well as water,
begun to explore methods that are better suited to dealing with uncertain futures. These methods and approaches address the growing need to evaluate multiple possible futures and seek out and consider disconfirming evidence as challenges in the planning and management processes. There is little evidence that methods such as scenario planning, enterprise risk management, or adaptive management are being integrated into forest planning. As FMPs come into revision, more tribes are asking for help in choosing models and methods from a growing array of options without guidance from multiple, trustworthy sources with similar experiences.
Participation in Carbon Markets
Tribal participation in carbon markets is new to the IFMAT series workstream. Since IFMAT III there has been rapid growth in participation by tribes in carbon markets. This participation has resulted in an important revenue source for some tribes and has placed tribal forests as prominent players in carbon offset markets and with new hopes for tribal participation in expanding voluntary markets. Carbon and other ecosystem service markets could become more important in supporting Indian forests goals, but policy makers should periodically review the experiences, benefits, costs, and risks of earlier entrants in the carbon market for important lessons.
Changing practices to accommodate climate impacts and risks
The suitability of conventional assumptions, tools, and tenets in current forest management and planning guidance may no longer be suitable for wrestling with multiple, cascading threats and extreme events not represented in their experience or science basis. Managers are recognizing the risks of relying too heavily on these tools and historical data. As they try to fit emerging climate patterns into concepts such as desired future condition (DFC),
“When working in the forest an offering needs to be given and we need to talk to it as a relative. Drought is nature’s way of reminding us to honor these things.” —IFMAT IV focus group participant
172 Assessment of Indian Forests and Forest Management in the United States
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