The Northern Great Plains (NGP) region plays a very important role in providing water and land resources and other critical ecosystem services to support rural livelihoods. Semi-arid conditions and the tight coupling of livelihood enterprises with ecosystem services increases sensitivity to climate change. The changing climate and social-economic situations across the NGP have further challenged current management practices. Recent climate stresses has indicated that changing seasonality and extreme events (e.g., droughts, floods, ice storms) are impacting ecosystem services and increasing vulnerability to rural livelihoods. In particular, the emergence of rapid on-set of drought has been problematic to resource managers and operators due the shortened period to respond to these drought events. This paper provides a regional example for the North American Great Plains to illustrate how emerging climate impacts affect the ability to respond within the social-ecological system capabilities to manage for these impacts. This paper is a contribution to an international effort, the Global Dryland Ecosystem Programme (Fu et al. this issue), to develop regional research and engagement efforts to further understand the impacts of climate change on ecosystem processes and to enable this knowledge to guide further development of adaptive management options.