Structuring conversations around climate‐ready restoration: Lessons from a place‐based workshop in Hawai'i

Climate change creates new challenges for conservation, yet capacity limitations often hinder practitioners' ability to consider climate change in restoration activities. Place‐based climate adaptation workshops can help practitioners develop tractable restoration strategies. In Hawaii, restoration needs are large, and climate change amplifies ecosystem vulnerability, calling attention to the potential benefit of more disturbance‐resilient restoration practices across the archipelago. In response, we designed a workshop to highlight locally grounded, climate‐ready restoration strategies across a diversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Facilitated discussions centered on practitioner perspectives for field‐based challenges, culminating in a set of implementation steps for climate‐related restoration strategies. By structuring the dialogue around real field sites and current practitioner needs, the workshop generated a cross‐ecosystem snapshot of climate‐ready restoration priorities. Here, we present major themes that emerged across groups, highlight innovative strategies, and reflect on how co‐production approaches like this can help bridge the gap between research, policy, and practice.