An integrated decision-support process for adaptation planning: climate change as impetus for scenario planning in an agricultural region of Canada

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• 作者：Ruth Waldick ; Livia Bizikova ; Denis White ; Kathryn Lindsay
• 关键词：Climate change adaptation ; Scenarios ; Regional planning ; Canada ; Agriculture ; Integrated assessment ; Uncertainty
• 刊名：Regional Environmental Change
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：17
• 期：1
• 页码：187-200
• 全文大小：1547KB
• 刊物类别：Earth and Environmental Science
• 刊物主题：Climate Change; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Oceanography; Geography, general; Regional/Spatial Science; Nature Conservation;
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：1436-378X
• 卷排序：17

文摘

The amount of information required to adapt to climate change is vast: downscaled climate projections, information on environmental impact, sectoral performance, external drivers, regional strategies, policies and practices. It can be argued that most of this information is accessible at the community/regional level, and thus, the important challenges to adaptation are not information gaps, but constraints created by fragmented planning decisions and a sector-by-sector basis for financial and human resource allocations. To strategically address this through adaptation planning, we developed and tested a place-based decision-making framework that creates an integrated platform for considering regional and global sectoral drivers in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Using available socioeconomic and biophysical information from regional authorities, alternative future scenarios were used to describe the range of socioeconomic futures and their vulnerabilities to climate change. We found that: (1) integration of diverse sets of available data (rather than narrowly focused sectoral assessments) helped identify shared common objectives (maximizing the long-term environmental, economic, social well-being within the region), (2) a high degree of congruence existed as the key drivers of change, irrespective of sector, (3) exploring the future scenarios highlighted shared regional priorities and helped identify adaptation priorities requiring more integrated regional planning.