PLAN - Responding to Climate Change: The Potentials of and Limits to Adaptation in Norway

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 PLAN project will also develop a web-based interactive geographic information system (GIS) that integrates information on climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptive capacity to enable actors and agents in Norway to assess the impli cations of climate change for their own communities, and plan for a ?well-adapted? future. The PLAN project will address three key research questions: 1) How do social processes influence the capacity to adapt to climate change? 2) What are the limits t o adaptation as a response to changing climate conditions? And 3) What are the implications of these limits for human security? The first question has not been extensively analyzed from the perspective of developed countries like Norway, while research on the latter two questions has been largely missing from intellectual and popular discourses on climate change.