I. Lorenzoni et al., A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment: Part I. Integrating socio-economic and climate change scenarios, GLOBAL ENV, 10(1), 2000, pp. 57-68
Citations number
26
Categorie Soggetti
Environment/Ecology
Journal title
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE-HUMAN AND POLICY DIMENSIONS
Climate change policies currently pay disproportionately greater attention
to the mitigation of climate change through emission reductions strategies
than to adaptation measures. Realising that the world is already committed
to some global warming, policy makers are beginning to turn their attention
to the challenge of preparing society to adapt to the unfolding impacts at
the local level. This two-part article presents an integrated, or 'co-evol
utionary', approach to using scenarios in adaptation and vulnerability asse
ssment. Part I explains how climate and social scenarios can be integrated
to better understand the inter-relationships between a changing climate and
the dynamic evolution of social, economic and political systems. The integ
rated scenarios are then calibrated so that they can be applied 'bottom up'
to local stakeholders in vulnerable sectors of the economy. Part I conclud
es that a co-evolutionary approach (1) produces a more sophisticated and dy
namic account of the potential feedbacks between natural and human systems;
(2) suggests that sustainability indicators are both a potentially valuabl
e input to and an output of integrated scenario formulation and application
. Part II describes how a broadly representative sample of public, private
and voluntary organisations in the East Anglian region of the UK responded
to the scenarios, and identifies future research priorities. (C) 2000 Elsev
ier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.