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

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

Table 3.1 Knowledge production in the Arctic Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC).

Arctic Council

BEAC

Role of knowledge

Identifying common issues for regional cooperation through knowledge-building

Specific issues of concern, especially related to Russia: development of transport network, tourism and dealing with environmental hotspots No long-term networks and partnerships for knowledge production – short-term, project-based cooperation on certain issues

Networks and partnerships

Continuous processes of scientific assessment, establishing networks and partnerships between different knowledge producers Defining the object, relations and agencies in collaboration In most cases the entire circumpolar region, with some local and regional examples

Rationale in knowledge production

Identifying practical action and funding needs

Regional focus

Focus on Russian part of the Barents study area

an important stakeholder group, as should the institutions responsible for securing the involvement of indigenous groups. A particularly challenging group to bring into regional climate strategy processes are businesses.This is due to their difficulty in seeing howmeeting climate challenges could concern their own everyday work and because their attention is often fully engaged with more immediate matters. Despite all this, those that have taken part in regional climate strategy processes, have said that they found them a good learning experience, even though time- consuming. International cooperation (especially for Russian regions) has also proved important. The BEAC working group that developed the climate action plan (Tennberg, 2015, 2016), found the most useful way to disseminate climate information was using maps. Regional and local decisions-makers also need economic analyses of costs and benefits of adaptationmeasures as well as statistical information with which to assess progress between the sub-regions on their implementation of climate strategies; better access is also needed to Russian information on various issues. Information needs to becomemore available andmore accessible (see alsoChapter 10). One example of how this could happen is a website developed by research institutes in Finland (www.climateguide.fi).This pools information in a uniform format at a single site, on mitigation as well as adaptation, and provides municipalities with concrete examples of appropriate measures in an interactive way. Such a tool would also be useful on a regional basis. 3.3.2 Framing issues regionally The challenge of developing a region-specific knowledge base is twofold: Adaptation is a complex issue and the Barents area is a complex region.The scale of the complexity became clear at the stakeholder event organized by the AACA Barents project team on 12 March 2015 in Rovaniemi, Finland.The event was part of a series of four stakeholder meetings in Finland to discuss AACA topics – drivers of change, their impacts, and adaptation – involving local, regional and national stakeholders. Two events took place in Rovaniemi (March and November 2015) and two in Helsinki (February and December 2016). The events were organized to support the drafting of a national report on adaptation for the AACA process (Tennberg et al., 2017) (stakeholder activities within theAACA process are also discussed in Chapter 5). One of the Finnish stakeholder meetings was held in association with the Arctic Business Forum with the aim of reaching

measures was reflected in An Action Plan on Climate Change in the Barents Region adopted by BEAC in 2013. The Action Plan contains a number of different projects under the headings Mitigation, Adaptation, Research, observation, monitoring and modelling and Outreach and its aim is to learn from county- level climate strategy processes in different parts of the region, and to support regional climate-strategy making in the Russian part of the Barents study area.The expectation is that the action plan “ may contribute positively to national goals ” (Norwegian Ministry of the Environment, 2013). In the Barents Program (2014-2018) (Barentsinfo, 2013), multiple connections of change are identified – both climatic and socio-economic – in regional development and cooperation. Approaches in adaptation governance differ across the Barents area.Municipalities in Sweden andNorway have a responsibility for adaptation while the approach in Finland and Russia is more regional (see Chapter 9). In the Nordic countries, the work on county-level climate strategies began in the late 2000s while this type of strategy work is still at an early stage in the Russian parts of the Barents area. According to an analysis by Sorvali (2015) based on information available fromdifferent countries, mitigation dominates over adaptation in their strategies and action plans. In the Nordic countries, regional strategies are mostly in place, but recent information on progress with implementation is lacking. Adaptation strategies also differ in their approaches at the regional and local level. The Nordic experience is that when a sub-regional climate strategy exists, climate change issues are incorporated into other policy documents and some implementation processes then follows. But it is often the case that vulnerability assessment or adaptive measures are either not included or are at very early stages of development, and the assessments are developed at a national level and mainly concern economic sectors. There are many lessons to be learned from these county-level processes in terms of knowledge provision for adaptation. According to Sorvali (2015) andHimanen et al. (2012), regional and local level strategywork is often supportedbynational policies and coordination. In many cases, outside funding (for example from EU programs) supports regional climate strategy work in its early stages, but proves an obstacle in the implementation phase if there is a lack of funding for implementation. Another issue is that the strategy work is led by experts and consultants without ownership and commitment from the municipal or regional body responsible for the issue once the funding ends.The local and regional politicians concerned should be considered