Mistra-SWECIA - Climate, Impacts and Adaptation
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THE PROBLEMClimate change constitutes an important and timely problem. It is inherently global in scope, but also contains regional and local concerns that need to be dealt with. There is a great wealth of knowledge on climate change. The knowledge production has been especially notable during the past few years, including both the understanding of the scientific issues and the implications to the society and the environment. This has paved the way for raising the issue of how to deal with climate change. Even though mitigation will occur, further climate change is unavoidable. The impact on societies and the environment brings about the need for adaptation that exists alongside mitigation. These two avenues of action are furthermore linked. Under any given socio-economic development, more mitigation implies less adaptation and vice versa. So far, research has emphasized mitigation rather than adaptation. The current mainstream mitigation research is not easily extended and translated into adaptation as many of the issues, and the stakeholders, are different. The decision-environment is complex and includes questions on “who", “when", “what" as to mitigation and adaptation. Decision-support includes various uncertainties on climate scenarios, impact assessments, costs and benefits. Improved scientific and practical knowledge, as well as better organisation and communication of both existing and new knowledge are paramount for progress on our dealing with climate change, on global, regional and local scale.HOW CAN THE PROGRAMME CONTRIBUTE TO A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM?The programme scope is global, but focuses much on regional and local scales. On each of these scales, climate, impacts, economy and adaptation processes will be considered. In case studies, these threads will be tied together around a specific sector and/or sub-region.The programme aims at creating a capacity for advanced analysis and assessment that combines climate, economy and impacts into a consistent frame. The starting point of the programme activities is existing research state-of-the-art on each of these, such as global and regional climate and impact models, an economic model and impact modelling on especially water resources, ecosystems and ecosystem services. With time, a new interdisciplinary approach will be forged, as a significant stepping stone for improved and useful understanding and handling of the systems, processes and issues at hand. In terms of models, this means the creation of integrated modelling that can better address the feedback and interrelation of climate and society/socio-economics. In addition to model development, these tools will also be applied throughout the programme to generate scenarios and assessments on climate, impacts and economy, to assist adaptation in practice. Users and other stakeholders will be engaged into these activities. Mistra-SWECIA will not just be a modelling programme, however. It will look into the adaptation process itself, focusing on learning from past and present success stories and on identifying bottlenecks in adaptation. These issues are interesting in themselves, but they will also help keep the research agenda relevant to users and put the results to practical use in promoting anticipatory adaptation to reduce risks and seize opportunities. In short, the programme has a scientific agenda and ambition, to shed more light on the complex of climate change, climate change impacts, adaptation opportunities, costs of such action and inaction, and other aspects of the adaptation process. Equally important, the programme minds the users and other stakeholders, both by streamlining their needs and experiences to the research process and by providing useful information for relevant decision-processes. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM THE RESULTS?In general, the activities and the results are meant to benefit the society at large and specific users. Examples of the latter are governmental authorities with responsibility and resources in climate adaptation, decision-makers on different levels, branches, enterprises and suchlike. Also the international and national climate change research and policy arenas will be among the foreseen beneficiaries.
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