Balancing multiple management objectives as climate change transforms ecosystems

Climate change triggers ecological transformations, altering ecosystem composition, functioning, and services globally.Many of these transformations may be irreversible on human timescales, posing challenges for ecosystem management and requiring new management paradigms.The RAD framework formalizes the management alternatives of resisting, accepting, or directing these transformations.The decision to resist, accept, or direct change may entail tradeoffs among ecological, sociocultural, and economic objectives (e.g., species conservation, ecosystem services, and ecological resilience).As RAD is implemented more widely, diverse knowledge systems, monitoring data, and manipulative experiments can improve our understanding of the conditions in which different RAD alternatives can successfully achieve multiple objectives. As climate change facilitates significant and persistent ecological transformations, managing ecosystems according to historical baseline conditions may no longer be feasible. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework can guide climate-informed management interventions, but in its current implementations RAD has not yet fully accounted for potential tradeoffs between multiple – sometimes incompatible – ecological and societal goals. Key scientific challenges for informing climate-adapted ecosystem management include (i) advancing our predictive understanding of transformations and their socioecological impacts under novel climate conditions, and (ii) incorporating uncertainty around trajectories of ecological change and the potential success of RAD interventions into management decisions. To promote the implementation of RAD, practitioners can account for diverse objectives within just and equitable participatory decision-making processes. As climate change facilitates significant and persistent ecological transformations, managing ecosystems according to historical baseline conditions may no longer be feasible. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework can guide climate-informed management interventions, but in its current implementations RAD has not yet fully accounted for potential tradeoffs between multiple – sometimes incompatible – ecological and societal goals. Key scientific challenges for informing climate-adapted ecosystem management include (i) advancing our predictive understanding of transformations and their socioecological impacts under novel climate conditions, and (ii) incorporating uncertainty around trajectories of ecological