Applying a framework of environmental and climate change adaptation to evaluate government intervention in coastal Louisiana

ABSTRACT

Government planning is an integral part of shaping decision-making about adaptation to environmental change. It affects the resources available for adaptation, and in turn enables or constrains the choices available to populations pursuing adaptation. In this article, we introduce a novel adaptation framework that supports the analysis of adaptation planning documents to identify patterns and trends in priorities among adaptation strategies. In turn, the framework can be applied to evaluate alignment with adaptation plan objectives and to compare plans across multiple scales of government. We apply this framework to analyse adaptation plans in coastal Louisiana, a region experiencing severe environmental change that threatens biodiversity and local livelihoods. Through our adaptation framework, we examine how the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana shapes the trajectory of environmental change adaptation in coastal Louisiana across scales of government. We find that techno-managerial solutions dominate the adaptation strategies proposed in the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s 2017 State of Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, and that the agency’s main adaptation strategies neglect to support of socio-economic and cultural adaptation approaches despite listing them as major objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• coastal Louisiana
• government
• CPRA
• master plan

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Dr. Michael Tyburski contributions and comments during the initial conceptualisation of the adaptation framework, Dr. Trevor Durbin for providing feedback during the preliminary research phase that informed this work, and Dr. Jeffrey Smith and Dr. Vahid Rahmani for providing comments on the research design. We further acknowledge the financial and professional support our project received from the Kansas State University McNair Scholars Program. Our project's financial support for data collection came from Kansas State University’s Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences. All authors equally contributed to the study conception and design. All authors equally preformed material preparation, data collection and analyses, manuscript drafting and editing. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kansas State University Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences Geography Graduate Research Grant.