Evaluation Tools to Identify Implications of Climate Change and Economic Development for Sustainability in Lijiang and Yulong Mountain Region, China

Research on developing well designed evaluation tools will provide the information and understanding necessary for identifying more effective adaptation options and better management plans for ensuring regional sustainability. This paper presents an integrated approach that integrates ecosystem vulnerability identification, adaptation option evaluation, and multi-stakeholder participation. The integrated approach will be applied in Lijiang and Yulong Mountain region of China for identifying desirable resource management plans to reduce ecosystem vulnerabilities. Different computerand non-model based methods will be adopted to form the integrated approach. The research starts with data collection and the identification of vulnerabilities of ecosystems and economic sectors to climate and socio-economic changes. This is followed by survey and interviews that allow stakeholders to participate in a multi-criteria evaluation of adaptation options. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP), an MCDM technique, will be employed as an adaptation evaluation tool to rank desirability of resource management plans. The paper will provide some articulation on how the integrated approach can provide an effective mean for the synthetic evaluation of the general desirability levels of a set of resource management plans through a multi-criteria and multi-stakeholder decision making process. Thus, the study contributes to the science of ecosystem assessment. Dr. Yongyuan Yin is a senior associate with SDRI/UBC and an environmental scientist with Environment Canada. His research interests cover climate change, sustainability evaluation, environmental and resource management. He has designed and applied integrated assessment (IA) methods to study the impacts of climate change and adaptation in the Georgia Basin and Mackenzie River Basin of Canada, and the Yangtze Delta in China. He is currently the Co-PI of an Assessments of Impacts of and Adaptation to Climate Change (AIACC) project in Western China funded by UNEP/GEF and is leading the IA of a CIDA project on carbon sequestration in China.