Climate Change and Globalization in the Arctic: An Integrated Approach to Vulnerability Assessment

Climate change vulnerability assessment - to assess people's overall vulnerability and adaptive capacity to climate change - is a rapidly developing field. However, despite the fact that major trends such as globalization and the changing characteristics of the political and economic governance systems are crucial in impacting and shaping a community's capacity to adapt to climate change, these trends are seldom included in climate change vulnerability assessments. This book addresses this shortcoming in that it first develops a methodology and framework for qualitative vulnerability assessment in "multiple impact" studies (of climate change and globalization), and then applies the framework to several cases of renewable natural resource use across scales.The book draws upon case studies of forestry and fishing - two of the largest sectors that rely on renewable natural resources - and reindeer herding in the European North. The study represents a bottom-up view, originating with the stakeholders themselves, of the degree to which stakeholders find adaptation to climate change possible and how they evaluate it in relation to their other concerns, notably economic and political ones. Moreover, the approach and research results include features that could be broadly generalized to other geographic areas or sectors characterized by renewable natural resource use.A local fisherman's capacity to adapt to climate change is directly affected by globalization (e.g. international regulation such as catch quotas) - an often-overlooked interplay with important connotations for future vulnerability. Based on original research, this book develops a powerful, transferable methodology for qualitative vulnerability assessment, building in the multiple impacts of climate change and globalization. It focuses on forestry and fisheries (two of the largest global natural resource use sectors) in the Arctic - one of the areas most immediately threatened by climate change.