Journal of Forestry, 2021, 557–563 doi:10.1093/jofore/fvab032 Brief Communication - social sciences Received December 31, 2020; Accepted April 26, 2021 Advance Access publication May 21, 2021 557 © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of American Foresters. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Brief Communication - social sciences Piloting a Climate-Change Adaptation Index on US National Forest Lands Michael R. Coughlan, Heidi Huber-Stearns, and Courtney Schultz Michael R. Coughlan (mcoughla@uoregon.edu) and Heidi Huber-Stearns (hhuber@uoregon.edu), Institute for a Sustainable Environment, University of Oregon, 130 Hendricks Hall, 5247 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA. Courtney Schultz (courtney.schultz@colostate.edu), Public Lands Policy Group, Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. Abstract Climate change presents a novel and signifcant threat to the sustainability of forest ecosystems worldwide. The United States Forest Service (USFS) has conducted climate change vulnerability assessments for much of the 193 million acres of national forest lands it manages, yet little to no research exists on the degree to which management units have adopted considerations of climate change into planning or project implementation. In response to this knowledge gap, we piloted a survey instrument in USFS Region 1 (Northern region) and Region 6 (Pacifc Northwest region) to determine criteria for assessing the degree to which national forests integrate climate-change considerations into their management planning and activities. Our resulting climate-change adap- tation index provides an effcient quantitative approach for identifying where, how, and, poten- tially, why some national forests are making more progress toward incorporating climate-change adaptations into forest planning and management. Study Implications: We used a self-assessment survey of planners and managers on US National Forests in Forest Service Regions 1 and 6 to design a climate change adaptation index for measuring the degree to which national forests units have integrated considerations of climate change into their planning and management activities. Our resulting index can potentially be used to help understand how and why the USFS’s decentralized climate-change adaptation strategy has led some national forests to make comparatively signifcant progress towards adapting to climate change while others have lagged behind. Keywords: Climate-change adaptation, forest planning and management, factor analysis Climate change presents a novel and signifcant threat to the sustainability of forest ecosystems worldwide (McCarthy et al. 2001, Pachauri and Reisinger 2008). Forest management and planning must not only account for the expected impacts from temperature warming, elevated CO 2 , and increased climate vari- ability, but also more indirect effects of climate change such as the spread of invasive species and the increased frequency and severity of ecological disturbances such as wildfres and insect and pathogen outbreaks (Vose and Klepzig 2014, Backlund 2008, Lawler 2009). The United States Forest Service (USFS) is the federal land management agency in charge of the National Forest System comprised of 78 million hectares (193 million acres) of public lands organized into 155 National Forest and 20 National Grassland management units. In anticipation of the need to respond to cli- mate change in national forests, the USFS developed a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/119/6/557/6279706 by guest on 11 March 2023