CRiSTAL Parks User’s Manual Version 1

Healthy ecosystems and Protected Areas (PAs) play a key role in reducing climate risks and helping to enhance the resilience of people to both climate and non-climate hazards.

At the same time, communities’ dependence on ecosystems and PAs for essential aspects of their livelihoods—such as drinking water, food, energy and other income-generating activities—can make them vulnerable to changing climatic and environmental conditions.

CRiSTAL Parks is a tool developed for conservation practitioners, including project planners and managers and PA managers, to integrate climate risks into conservation planning, identify the potential of PAs or conservation zones to reduce those risks and develop tailored climate change adaptation measures.

CRiSTAL Parks builds on the previous Community-based Risk Screening Tool – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) tool to focus more explicitly on the links between human communities and conservation areas to understand how this relationship creates vulnerabilities or supports the adaptive capacity of both people and ecosystems to the potential impacts of climate change.

For more information about the CRiSTAL project-planning tool and its specialized versions, please visit: https://www.iisd.org/cristaltool/