A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment: Part I. Integrating socio-economic and climate change scenarios

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.