Climate adaptation science has rapidly expanded, leading to a proliferation of planning frameworks and tools, each designed to help resource managers respond to a changing climate. Yet this innovation has also brought confusion, as practitioners grapple with how methods like vulnerability assessments, scenario planning, and frameworks such as Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) or Resistance-Resilience-Transition (RRT) relate to one another. In "Toward a shared vision for climate-informed resource stewardship", authored by colleagues from our NC CASC team on the USGS side, including Brian Miller, Aparna Bamzai-Dodson, and Molly Cross, the paper provides a path toward coherence by showing that these approaches share common foundations and can be used together to guide clear, flexible, and science-based decision making across institutions and landscapes.

The authors outline a generalized seven-step process that integrates key tools, from defining goals and assessing climate implications to implementing and evaluating adaptation strategies, into a unified framework for climate-informed resource stewardship. This process emphasizes collaboration, transparency, and iterative learning, helping managers align objectives, account for uncertainty, and continuously improve decisions as conditions evolve. By articulating how existing tools complement rather than compete with one another, the paper offers a shared vision for more coordinated, cross-jurisdictional adaptation planning in an era of ecological transformation.