Project: Climate change, community response and multilevel governance.

The aim of this project is to build a Nordic network for research on local climate adaptation and mitigation in the context of multilevel governance. By organizing a series of workshops for researchers and stakeholders, it will create a foundation for making creative links among the increasing number of ongoing research projects on climate adaptation. Furthermore, by placing the climate adaptation research into a context of sustainable development, it will explicitly link the analysis of adaptation to the issues of mitigation. The theoretical context of multilevel governance will create a potential for analysing the links between local, national, and international climate policy. The expected output of the project is a network that will increase the value of ongoing research projects by sharing of methods and results. It will also serve to bridge between research and practice in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This will produce one or more joint research proposals that take advantage of the different national settings to develop strong comparative approaches in relation to both different national contexts, between EU and non-EU contexts, and between rural and urban areas. One of the workshops will focus on the Arctic, which will allow analysis that explicitly examines the role of international regional governance. Moreover, we will produce a review article of climate adaptation in the participating countries. The workshops will include representatives of major ongoing research projects on climate adaptation in the Finland, Norway, and Sweden and link to research on sustainable development in the context of Local Agenda 21 and on other environmental stressors and social processes. Common themes for the workshops will be the challenges of participatory research and the role of local mitigation and adaptation actions in the context of national and international climate politics. Special attention will be paid to the role of international regional cooperation with the Arctic as an example. Furthermore, we will focus on combining scenarios of climate change with scenarios of socioeconomic change to better understand the cumulative effect of these two processes for local vulnerability. We will also raise the long-term challenge of preparing for a post-carbon society; a concept which have just recently been coined by the EU.

Acronym	COMMUNITY RESPONSE
Website	visit project website
Network	CIRCLE
Call	2nd Call - CIRCLE NORdic

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	Center for International Climate and Environmental Research		Norway
	Stockholm Environment institute	Coordinator	Sweden
	Umeå University		Sweden
	University of Helsinki		Finland
	University of Lapland		Finland
	Western Norway Research Institute		Norway