The role of values in adaptation to climate change: A Q-Methodology Approach as an integration tool for the PLAN project

PLAN is a coordinated, social science-based research project that analyzes the potentials of and limits to adaptation as a response to climate change in Norway. This four-year project will provide an empirical and theoretical understanding of adaptation a s a social process, with an emphasis on its potential to reduce negative impacts and realize the potential benefits of climate change. It will also contribute to a relatively new discourse on the societal limits to adaptation as an effective response to c limate change. The PLAN project considers how Norway's potentially high capacity to adapt to climate change through infrastructural, technological, institutional and behavioural changes differs across communities that are embedded in different and dynam ic biophysical and social contexts. It emphasizes the ways that competing interests, objectives and priorities, differing values, unequal power relations, and policy planning processes constrain or facilitate adaptation at national, individual, and commun ity levels. The proposed project builds upon the PLAN collaboration with the Tyndall Centre to involve them more directly in the implementation of a method for measuring key values among Norwegian actors and stakeholders. The collaboration is linked to the sub-project on "Assessing the Limits to Adaptation and Consequences for Human Security" which involves development of a framework for evaluating the role of values in adaptation. It will support a six-month visit by Dr. Johanna Wolf to assist PLAN in implementation of a Q-methodology that will rigorously assess values and their implications for adaptation.