Europe

Valuing the environment remains a problematic and controversial process. Objections vary from concerns about the legitimacy of the procedure to the technical difficulty of the process itself. The purpose of this workshop was to explore these concerns in the context of managed realignment. The purpose of the workshop was real moreover and not dryly academic. Like it or not, a quantified case goes along way in the today’s policy climate. Thus the environment is at a great disadvantage, if soundly based numbers cannot be deployed in its defence.

The paper deals with the social and economic dimensions of climate change impacts and adaptation in Italy. The ultimate aim of the paper is to provide policy makers and experts with a conceptual framework, as well as methodological and operational tools for dealing with climate change impacts and adaptation from an economic perspective. In order to do so, first a conceptual and theoretical framework of the economic assessment of climate change impacts is presented and the state of the art about impact assessment studies is briefly analysed.

This work illustrates the preliminary findings of a participatory research process aimed at identifying responses for sustainable water management in a climate change perspective, in two river basins in Europe and Asia. The paper describes the methodology implemented through local workshops, aimed at eliciting and evaluating possible responses to flooding risk. Participatory workshops allowed for the identification of four categories of possible responses and a set of nine evaluation criteria, three for each of the three pillars of sustainable development.

Over the past few decades the problem of eutrophication of water bodies has accelerated due to large additions of nutrients from human sources. This paper conducts a contingent valuation of household willingness to pay to reduce eutrophication impacts. The application employs the recently proposed one-and-one-half-bound dichotomous choice method for eliciting willingness to pay responses. It is also novel in that an examination of the rate and determinants of survey participation are analysed allowing superior aggregation of total values by allowing for those who refuse to be interviewed.

Adaptation to climate change often involves long time frames and uncertainties over consequences of chosen adaptation measures. In this study, two tools developed for assisting local decision-makers in adaptation planning were tested: socio-economic scenarios and sustainability analysis. The objective was to study whether these tools could be of practical relevance to Swedish municipalities and foster local level climate change adaptation.

The aim of this report was to identify the most appropriate measures on the EU level to address different threats. A final selection of measures to be assessed with a view to their costs and economic, social and environmental impacts was agreed at the first interim meeting with the Commission. Measures already part of EU wide assessment projects were no part of the assessment.

It is well recognized that adaptive and flexible flood risk strategies are required to account for future uncertainties. Development of such strategies is, however, a challenge. Climate change alone is a significant complication, but, in addition, complexities exist trying to identify the most appropriate set of mitigation measures, or interventions. There are a range of economic and environmental performance measures that require consideration, and the spatial and temporal aspects of evaluating the performance of these is complex.

At its core, the report presents an eight-stage decision- making framework. Given the broad audience and diversity of applications, the framework and supporting guidance are inevitably rather generic. There are questions for the decision-maker to apply at each stage, and tools that may help. Guidance is provided for any decision that is likely to be influenced by climate, and decisions being made specifically in response to climate.

Over the past decades, significant experience has been gained in demand-driven research on climate change in many countries. In the Netherlands, a competitive call for proposals for large research programmes at the interface between policy, science and private sector was issued in 2001. Members of the Dutch climate research community proved they were able to develop two large research programme proposals which were funded: ‘Climate changes Spatial Planning’ and its successor ‘Knowledge for Climate’. The programmes ran from 2004 to 2012 and from 2008 to 2014, respectively.

The MEDIATION project guides researchers, policy advisors and experts to suitable climate change adaptation methods and tools for a wide range of questions and from various disciplines and perspectives. The project involves 11 partners and 11 case studies. Summaries of five of these case studies can be found in the present publication. Further information on the MEDIATION methodology, Adaptation Platform and training materials, which were developed for experts with basic technical or scientific knowledge rather than the general public,