The MARE conference topic of 2017 was Dealing with Maritime Mobilities and took place in Amsterdam July 5th-7th.
Operational Manager and WP3 participant Rachel Tiller from SINTEF Ocean/NTNU participated with a presentation from Ocean Certain on results of the stakeholder workshops in Norway.
The title of her presentation was “Adapting to the Unknown”, part of the session called Adaptive Capacity and Maritime Governance, which Dr. Tiller also was Chair of.
This is the abstract:
Playing an experimental game to assess the adaptive capacity of commercial fishers to changing marine environments in Senja, Norway
Authors: Rachel Tiller (SINTEF Ocean), Yajie Liu, Center for Economic Research (SØF), Hugo Salgado (TALCA University, Chile) and Jennifer Bailey (NTNU)
As the worldwide consensus on climate change culminated with the ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2016, sea surface temperatures were at record highs for most of the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea, and increasing trend since the 1970s. The ocean is a significant absorber of atmospheric CO2, thereby regulating the global climate through the biological pump. The ocean is therefore a prime place where scientists have been studying future and observing ongoing consequences of global warming, and where ecosystem goods and services are changing allegiances with changing chemical compositions in the water, including CO2, pH, and temperature. At the local level, policy makers and stakeholders alike therefore need to consider whether and how future changes to marine systems caused by climate change may affect their local communities and their adaptive capacity in light of this. However, risk communication of the effects of changes in the marine food web suffers from stakeholders` need for short term returns, and could lead them to put off long-term investments and representing a “dictatorship of the present”. The following article therefore explores to what extent the projected cascaded risks and effects of climate change to the marine environment reaches the consciousness of local stakeholders, and to what extent they perceive their adaptation possibilities and mobility options in light of this. We specifically explore the perceptions of commercial fishers to their own adaptive capacity to changes in the marine environment using a mix of methodologies, including an experimental game, in two local communities in Northern Norway.
Here is the presentation in PDF: Adapting to the unknown future in Norway – MARE conference 2017 – Rachel Tiller