Globally, areas of high-quality wildlife habitat of significant environmental value are at risk of permanent damage from climate change. These areas represent social-ecological systems that will require increasing management intervention to maintain their biological and socio-cultural values. Managers of protected areas have begun to recognize the inevitability of ecosystem change and the need to embrace dynamic approaches to intervention. However, significant uncertainty remains about the onset and severity of some impacts, which makes planning difficult. For Indigenous communities, there are intrinsic links between cultural heritage and the conservation of place and biodiversity that need to be better integrated in protected area planning and management. In New South Wales, Australia, management of public conservation reserves and national parks is the responsibility of a State government agency, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). This paper describes the outcomes of a participatory planning process with NPWS staff to, firstly, identify the options available, the available ‘tool kit’, to manage biodiversity and cultural heritage in protected areas; secondly, explore how the selection of management actions from the ‘tool kit’ is associated with the level of climate risk to biodiversity or cultural heritage assets; and thirdly, to understand how the form of individual management actions might adapt to changes in climate risk. Combining these three elements into a series of risk-based, adaptive pathways for conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage is a novel approach that is currently supporting place-based planning for public conservation areas. Incorporation of the trade-offs and synergies in seeking to effectively manage these discrete but related types of values and the implications for conservation practice are discussed.

Government seeks to manage public protected areas, such as national parks, to conserve high-quality wildlife habitats and provide essential ecosystems services at risk of permanent damage or extinction from climate change. The complexity of the organizational structure required to deliver this breadth of functions, coupled to uncertainty surrounding the onset and severity of climate impacts at local scale, impedes planning for climate change. This paper describes the development of an adaptation planning tool and its application in a pilot planning process for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the agency of the New South Wales (NSW) Government (Australia) responsible for management of national parks and public conservation reserves. The process involved close engagement in knowledge co-production in participatory workshops, and employed two complementary techniques, adaptive pathways and risk assessment. It successfully elicited tacit knowledge of agency staff about the range of interventions available, the need for management practices to evolve, and of discontinuities in management pathways in a dynamic risk environment. Findings suggest that management effort across the NSW reserve system will increase as climate risk rises. Consequently, government will need to respond to increased demand for resources, for better targeting of those resources, and for management innovation in how resources are deployed to support adaptation that is both anticipatory and transformative.

Addressing climate change risks requires collaboration and engagement across all sectors of society. In particular, effective partnerships are needed between research scientists producing new knowledge, policy‐makers and practitioners who apply conservation actions on the ground. We describe the implementation of a model for increasing the application and useability of biodiversity research in climate adaptation policy and practice. The focus of the program was to increase the ability of a state government agency and natural resource practitioners in Australia to manage and protect biodiversity in a changing climate. The model comprised a five‐stage process for enhancing impact (i) initiation of research projects that addressed priority conservation policy and management issues; (ii) co‐design of the research using a collaborative approach involving multiple stakeholders; (iii) implementation of the research and design of decision tools and web‐based resources; (iv) collaborative dissemination of the tools and resources via government and community working groups; and (v) evaluation of research impact. We report on the model development and implementation, and critically reflect on the model's impact. We share the lessons learnt from the challenges of operating within a stakeholder group with diverse objectives and criteria for success, and provide a template for creating an environmental research program with real world impact.