Overview

Climate Foresight is a planning tool in Planscape used to evaluate how current landscape conditions align with long-term climate resilience goals. The tool applies the PROMOTE framework to translate ecological datasets into standardized metrics that highlight areas where management actions may support ecosystem resilience into the future.

Climate Foresight combines spatially explicit ecological data with climate change vulnerability assessments to identify areas on the landscape where resilient conditions are currently stable, where management intervention may improve long-term resilience, or where transitions to alternative states are likely.

The PROMOTE Framework

PROMOTE is a decision-support framework for incorporating climate change into strategic forest planning. The approach evaluates current ecological conditions alongside projected climate constraints to identify where management actions are most likely to produce durable outcomes. PROMOTE integrates multiple indicators of ecosystem function—such as carbon storage, biodiversity, water security, air quality, fire dynamics, and forest resilience—into a consistent quantitative framework that allows managers to compare conditions and trajectories across landscapes.

At its core, PROMOTE maps landscapes within a two-dimensional decision space defined by current functional condition and future climate suitability (Povak et al.  2024). This framework supports four broad strategic management pathways: Monitor, where ecosystems are functioning well and expected to remain viable; Protect, where ecosystems are currently functional but vulnerable to future climate change; Adapt, where conditions are degraded but future climate may still support recovery; and Transform, where both current conditions and future climate suggest that maintaining current ecosystem states may be unlikely. Climate change impacts are evaluated using a climate analog approach where current conditions at a given focal cell are compared with those across 900 analog locations (Povak and Manley 2024).

By linking present ecosystem structure and function with future climate trajectories, PROMOTE shifts planning away from focusing solely on the most degraded areas. Instead, it helps prioritize actions where climate will be less limiting to long-term success, while also identifying high-functioning landscapes that warrant protection because they are vulnerable to future climate change. This provides a transparent, climate-informed basis for strategic investment in landscape resilience.

Povak, N.A. and Manley, P.N., 2024. Evaluating climate change impacts on ecosystem resources through the lens of climate analogs. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 6, p.1286980.

Povak, N.A., Manley, P.N. and Wilson, K.N., 2024. Quantitative methods for integrating climate adaptation strategies into spatial decision support models. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 7, p.1286937.

Why Climate Foresight Was Developed

Land managers often work with large numbers of datasets that vary in scale, units, and interpretation. This can make it difficult to compare metrics or understand how they collectively influence landscape resilience.

Climate Foresight was developed to help address these challenges by:

• Standardizing diverse datasets into a common scale
• Allowing planners to define favorable and non-favorable conditions
• Grouping metrics into meaningful ecological categories
• Highlighting areas where management actions may improve long-term outcomes
• Identifying areas where management may not be warranted

This approach supports more transparent and repeatable analysis when planning landscape treatments or evaluating ecosystem conditions.

Next Steps

To learn how to run the tool, see: How to Use Climate Foresight