Climate change: a regional assessment of vulnerability and adaptive capacity for the Nordic countries

Welcome to the home page of CARAVAN

CARAVAN is a research project that runs from June 2008 to December 2010, with the full title:

"Climate change: a regional assessment of vulnerability and adaptive capacity for the Nordic countries"

The main aim of CARAVAN is to undertake a comparison of approaches for estimating regional vulnerability to climate change in the Nordic region. Vulnerability is a function of exposure to climate change, sensitivity to its effects and adaptive capacity for coping with the effects. These elements are being examined in the project, with indicators being developed in collaboration with regional stakeholders for future periods out to 2050. The indicators will then be combined in various ways to describe vulnerability. Indices of vunerability will be computed at municipality scale and mapped across the Nordic region.

This is a pilot project, with initial efforts directed towards a Nordic-wide analysis of the agricultural sector. However, since the work is closely related to ongoing or proposed studies of vulnerability in individual partner countries, CARAVAN may also be able to draw on experiences from those projects to refine and extend the analysis.

News

• First CARAVAN stakeholder meeting to be held in Sweden, 3-4 September 2009 (by invitation - more later).
• The CARAVAN kick-off meeting took place at the Finnish Environment Institute on 25-26 November 2008. More information is available on the internal website or by contacting the Project Leader.

Documents and data

CARAVAN internal website

Research team and funding

CARAVAN is a partnership of three organisations comprising an interdisciplinary research team:

• Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, Finland
  Timothy Carter (Project Leader), Stefan Fronzek, Aino Inkinen, Jari Lyytimäki
• University of Oslo, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, Oslo, Norway
  Karen O'Brien, Lynn Rosentrater
• University of Linköping, Centre for Climate Science and Policy, Linköping, Sweden
  Louise Simonsson

The total budget is 148,000 Euro, which is provided from national sources by: The Academy of Finland, The Research Council of Norway and The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.

The project is funded under the Nordic-Call of the CIRCLE ERA-Net (Climate Impact Research Coordination for a Larger Europe). CIRCLE seeks to implement a European Research Area (ERA) for the field of climate change, through networking and by aligning national research. It is part of the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme.

Contact information

For more details, contact:

Professor Timothy Carter
Research Programme for Global Change
Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE)

firstname.lastname@ymparisto.fi