Assessments about the nature, rate, impacts and responses to climate change deal with change in coupled environmental-human systems. In making future projections of climate variability and change, mitigation and adaptation, assessments are therefore faced with making assumptions about the future social and economic changes, often over the long-term. In stand-alone assessments, the analyst will be free to develop appropriate, tailored scenarios. In complex cross-sectoral research programmes it is analytically useful to develop a set of common approaches and assumptions, which is one of the major objectives of this theme.
Objectives
General research aims:
To develop a consistent framework for socio-economic scenario’s on land use change at the national and regional provincial level (in international context) that can serve as a planning context for adaptation and mitigation strategies at sub regional and local scale.
To evaluate, develop and extend land use models and databases in order to project the spatial implications of adaptation and mitigation strategies under different climate projections (project CS7) and socio-economic scenarios.
To develop a set of policy indicators and visualisation tools that supports analysis of potential co-benefits and conflicts of land use change in different sectors (such as nature, water, agriculture) as a result of future climate policy (adaptation and mitigation).
To investigate how institutional (legal, policy and organizational) frameworks at different administrative levels promote or hamper the realization of effective, efficient and legitimate climate policy.
To develop a method for consistently identifying costs and benefits of adaptation and mitigation within spatial planning, taking into account ancillary benefits, non-monetary values and joint outputs.
To develop a method that is apt to assist stakeholder assessments in mapping out the argumentation patterns of stakeholders in decision making about climate policy and the use of scientific knowledge in this process. The projects under the theme ‘Integration’ are meant to integrate activities within themes Climate scenario's, Mitigation and Adaptation. To do so, it will also safeguard consistency across the whole programme. Integration will be achieved by use of
integrated assessment
cost benefit analysis
governance studies
participatory methods.
Research within this theme will support informed dialogues between policy-makers, scientists, stakeholders from business, NGOs and individual citizens / consumers (theme Communication).
