Impacts - An information tool for citizens to assess impacts of climate change from a regional perspective

Participatory Integrated Assessement (IA) methods complement analytical met hods like IA-modeling in their explicit inclusion of stakeholders and decis ion-makers in the assessment. Integrated Assessment is perceived as a proce ss of social learning involving scientists, stakeholders, policymakers and the society at large. We introduce a new approach to provide expert knowled ge for participatory integrated assessments of regional climate change: 'In teractive Citizen's Information Tools' (ICITs). ICITs provide citizens with expert knowledge about causes of climate change, potential impacts, and po licy options to address anthropogenic climate change. In this paper we disc uss the development and application of IMPACTS in IA-focus groups in Switze rland. IMPACTS is based on user-friendly hypermedia technologies and allows citizens to get informed on a broad range of potential climate change impa cts - with an emphasis on prevailing uncertainties. IA-focus groups are del iberative group discussions that make use of computer tools to support the discussion and assessment. The goal of IA-focus groups is to elicit how inf ormed citizens judge the risks of anthropogenic climate change. Experiences with IMPACTS showed that the combination of focus groups with ICITs is a f easible and promising approach for a participatory IA of regional climate c hange, in particular, and of complex environmental issues, in general.