A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment: Part II. Ascenario-based case study in East Anglia (UK)

Policy makers are beginning to intensify their search for policies that ass ist society to adapt to the unfolding impacts of climate change at the loca l level. This paper forms the second part of a two part examination of the potential for using scenarios in adaptation and vulnerability assessment. P art I explained how climate change and socio-economic scenarios can be inte grated to better understand the complex inter-relationships between a chang ing climate and a dynamically evolving social system. This second part desc ribes how a broadly representative sample of public, private and voluntary organisations in the East Anglian region of the UK responded to the scenari os, and identifies future research priorities. The main findings are that i ntegrated socio-economic and climate scenarios applied 'bottom up' to local ly important stakeholders: (1) provide a sophisticated and dynamic mechanis m to explore the potential feedbacks between natural and human systems; (2) offer a means to understand the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of dif ferent exposure units; (3) promote social learning by encouraging participa nts to assess the adequacy of their existing climate strategies for longer than their normal planning periods. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All righ ts reserved.