Climate-adapted restoration practices

This step involves analysing the information you’ve gathered to gain a deeper understanding of how climate risks affect the site’s values. It will also help you understand how climate-related hazards such as extreme heat, flooding, sea-level rise and bushfires could affect restoration projects. You’ll refine your findings with your stakeholders to validate and build support for a climate-adapted restoration approach. 

What this stage typically involves 

• Selecting and documenting your analysis approach, including risk assessment, decision-making, and tools and methods used. The size of your analysis will depend on the context and scale of your restoration project.
• Refining and prioritising the list of values that the restoration site supports (and used to support) and their sensitivity to climate change. This will help you prioritise your management actions later. When determining the relative importance of each value, consider stakeholder insights alongside the management objectives of any relevant biodiversity plans, and the principles of the Climate Change (Net Zero Future) Act 2023.
• Assessing and documenting the site’s current condition (baseline) so you can measure change and track your progress. To find the baseline, review the sources of condition data you identified in the previous step, to understand the extent and condition of the site’s ecosystems.
• Assessing the site’s historical condition (less-degraded condition) and future capacity for regeneration. This requires understanding the drivers of degradation, such as invasive species, pests and diseases, changed water and fire regimes, pollution, erosion, land clearing and loss of habitat connectivity.
• Setting a climate-appropriate future condition of the site. Information about the site’s historical values will help you set a future condition based on the important values to restore. Focusing on restoring the site’s values rather than its specific characteristics allows for flexibility in how you achieve your restoration outcomes. Similarly, select condition indicators that reflect the key values you want to restore. This will keep your monitoring and evaluation focused on the future you’re aiming to achieve, rather than on maintaining current conditions.
• Identifying the type of restoration activities needed to achieve the future condition, (for example, weed control or habitat reconstruction) and how those activities might be affected by climate change. The type of activities you choose will depend on the site’s condition, the desired future condition, and the site’s capacity to naturally regenerate with or without assistance.  
• Analysing past, current and projected climate trends and events to identify risks to the site’s values and restoration activities. This is informed by the climate records and projections you’ve identified and considers the role of the site’s current condition in the resulting climate impacts. For example, how will warmer temperatures affect a cool-climate site’s biodiversity (a value) and the success of revegetation (an activity)?
• Ranking your list of climate risks based on their likelihood, severity, timing and the consequences for values and restoration activities. To do this, you might use a first-pass risk assessment procedure and generic risk assessment matrix or a cost–benefit analysis. Taking a Country-first perspective and talking with local landowners when assessing consequences for values can help you understand the direct and indirect impacts that climate risks may have on all aspects of social, cultural, ecological and economic values. 

This step involves assigning climate-adapted restoration actions to the climate risks you prioritised in the previous step. You’ll identify actions that are suited to future climate conditions and that offer the best outcomes for the values you want to restore. You’ll use these to make a plan for implementation that fits within your scope and context. 

What this stage typically involves 

• Identifying restoration actions that will restore the site’s condition and values, and will support the site’s capacity to naturally regenerate with or without assistance.
• Considering whether a value can be protected or restored in place, and where planned relocation, documentation of cultural and social assets, or acceptance of change may be required. For example, it may not be possible to protect a significant alpine ecosystem from warming temperatures, so you may need to source plant stock from the same species that grow in warmer areas.
• Exploring potential adaptation actions by reviewing current literature on best-practice restoration, consulting landholders, and checking any guidelines relevant to your project (for example, if you are restoring land as part of a grant program or carbon crediting scheme). The Restore and Renew webtool supports climate‑ready restoration by guiding seed sourcing to maximise genetic diversity.
• Choosing and prioritising actions based on their effectiveness, feasibility, alignment with values and cost of implementation, and your available resources and relevant policy or legislative settings. Depending on your context, you might identify actions such as
  • restoring habitats through installing small dams to retain water in landscapes, removing tidal barriers, or planting dense riparian vegetation to provide shade
  • using a variety of restoration methods and staggering activities over time (these often require longer timeframes and have higher costs)
  • incorporating ‘future climate’ genetic material, such as planting stock from a mixture of species and provenances, to account for future climate uncertainty and support ongoing natural regeneration
  • using seed enhancement technologies such as seed priming and coating to promote germination
  • increasing erosion control measures to protect recovering land from intense rainfall events
  • increasing weed control and pest management activities as invasive species spread to more favourable climate conditions.
• Developing a timeline for implementation. Using a pathways approach helps to schedule actions based on urgency, importance, and any triggers for implementation (for example, when a certain threshold is reached).
• Securing support for implementation in the form of funding, collaboration and equipment. Think about what you’ll need and how you can source it – for example, access to climate-adapted seed and tube stock, fire risk reduction measures, installing shade and water sources, erosion control measures, soil and water quality remediation measures, installation of critical habitat features, weed and pest control, grazing management, and long-term maintenance and monitoring.
• Building adaptation actions into routine restoration practices, with a focus on flexibility to alter actions as climate change continues to unfold. 

Regular monitoring will help you track your progress and fulfil any specific monitoring requirements of the Integrated Planning and Reporting framework (for local councils) or the reporting requirements of supporting grants or government programs. 

Depending on the site’s values and risks and the actions you’ve chosen, you’ll likely need a combination of different monitoring methods. 

What this stage typically involves 

• Choosing appropriate monitoring techniques for your context. These could include remote-sensing technologies, photo-points and site photographs, landholder reports, reference sites for comparison, data from program reports (such as carbon credit and offset reports), and ground measurements for vegetation, fauna, critical habitat features, soil condition, water quality, pests, weeds, disease, planting survival, germination and recruitment. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) can help detect early and subtle signs of changing condition – incorporate TEK in your monitoring regime through respectful collaboration with Aboriginal groups and knowledge holders.
• Planning a monitoring regime that suits the values, risks, goals and actions of your restoration plan. This will support regular data collection to measure changes in the site’s condition (compared with the baseline). For long-term monitoring plans, you may need to increase the frequency of monitoring activities as the climate continues to change.
• Monitoring your identified indicators, along with climate events. Using value-specific indicators will ensure restoration outcomes can be measured and managed in the most efficient and effective ways. For example, if one of your key values is to restore habitat for a particular threatened species, you may choose to assess the condition using indicators such as extent of suitable food trees and number of large habitat trees in a restoration site.
• Reviewing the performance of your actions relative to the baseline and desired future condition and adjusting your approach, actions and priorities according to monitoring data.
• Meeting reporting requirements of relevant programs and policies. Your organisation may also have monitoring frameworks and processes as part of their wider environmental management system. 

Our knowledge of climate-adapted restoration is still growing. Your experiences can inform and inspire other practitioners to incorporate values-based adaptation into their own planning, warn them about potential pitfalls, and provide valuable information to help them make the right decisions for their site. 

What this stage typically involves 

• Sharing success stories that acknowledge the contributions of stakeholders. This includes publishing stories jointly with collaborators, and following cultural safety protocols to ensure that traditional knowledge is shared appropriately.
• Encouraging project participants and stakeholders to champion their own successes and contributions to the project.
• Sharing your lessons (successes and challenges) and connecting with other practitioners through educational community meetings and workshops, AdaptNSW case studies, the Local Land Services YouTube channel, the Society for Ecological Restoration, Landcare networks, scientific publications and conferences, the Australian Association of Bush Regenerators and the Plant Conservation Australia.