Scholarly record
GLOBAL CHANGE AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AFFECTING LOCAL NATURAL RESOURCES
Abstract
Novel or accelerated global changes call for local action. The question on how to adapt to global change led recently to the formulation of a number of national and regional adaptation strategies to climate change. Beside climate, however, also other aspects as land use, agricultural markets and social structures are affected by and in return influence the perpetual global change. The steady interaction between regional development and global change further complicates a holistic strategy formulation. In order to study these interactions, an interdisciplinary research group was established at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2008. The aim is to highlight options on how ecological, economical and social interdependencies can be analyzed, interpreted and incorporated into regional adaptation strategies. In order to generate appropriate and practice-orientated results, the discussion is focused on possible impacts related to the natural resource “water” within the German region of Berlin-Brandenburg. In a first step all involved disciplines identified key questions that were expected to lead towards the desired results. Beside discipline specific issues two cross-cutting issues were formulated: 1) spatial and temporal scales and 2) robustness of socio-ecological systems. The ongoing work shows that system knowledge and target knowledge can be partly elaborated within clusters of closely related disciplines (e.g. natural, economic and social sciences). All questions related to transformation knowledge require, however, a discussion across disciplines from the start. The interdisciplinary discussion of cross-cutting issues leads to a comprehensive problem definition as a basis for a common understanding and ensure that system and target knowledge gathered by the different disciplines can be brought together at the end. Even though the research group has a thematic and spatial focus, its conceptual findings may offer more general insights for regional adaptation approaches to global change.
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