Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Chapter 5 · Future narratives

Carl-Johan Utsi

developments, not only regarding climate change but also in relation to resource markets, international security, values and norms, and technology development. For several of these issues, the future is highly uncertain,creating a range of potential global futures with a corresponding range of potential local and regional futures.Some of these issuesmay also be linked to climate change outside the region, highlighting the need to include attention to indirect impacts of climate change.The space of uncertainty created by the potential for very different global trajectories of social, economic and political developments at the global level needs to be integrated into current decision-making processes relating to adaptation and into strategic planning. 5.5.1 Knowledge gaps and ways forward The strong focus on the role of values and ‘soft’ qualities in the local narratives about the future highlights a need for better knowledge of social trends that are difficult to quantify. Other factors identified as relevant for future challenges lend themselves to further studies with quantitative methods. This might be especially relevant for demographic dynamics. There is also a need for methods to integrate qualitative assessment of social trends within frameworks that focus on quantitative analysis. An important component of such development is to find ways to systematically review the quality of the information available. For the global scenarios, there is a vision to develop integrated assessment models. While this may be more challenging at the local level, due to the resources needed for such work, a focus for future research could be to developmethods that better integrate narrative and quantitative scenario approaches at the regional scale. An additional line of further research is to link the future-oriented scenarios

5.5 Summary and discussion All countries in the Barents area have well-developed climate change scenarios for their northern areas. A major challenge is to understand how climate change scenarios are used by decision-makers in different contexts at any level. Many of the nationally developed scenarios do not involve much local knowledge (Pilli-Sihvola et al., 2015), but it is becoming more common to include practitioners and users in scenario building, especially at the local level and in relation to specific sectors. Participatory workshops that combine scenarios and local narratives provide a method for engaging local and regional actors in the process of producing knowledge relevant for future planning. The new global scenario framework that has been developed – the global SSPs in particular – provides a useful context for co-constructing local and regional narratives that link to both global development and local contexts. While the approach of producing narratives based on input from local workshops is similar to methods used in NORADAPT, the work on producing extended SSPs for this chapter provides a more systematic link to global development paths. Lessons learned from projects with strong user involvement suggest that in addition to involving multiple disciplines, the most important aspect is finding methods that ensure engagement in the process (see, for example, Dannevig et al., 2012; Jönsson and Gerger Swartling, 2014). To develop tools that are useful for adaptation action, it is thus relevant to evaluate how different scenario approaches manage to engage practitioners in different contexts and so help construct shared worldviews. An overarching conclusion from the four scenario exercises is that local adaptation challenges are closely linked to global

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