The success of global work to mitigate climate change is, according to Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (2009), dependent on also efficient work on national, regional and local levels. In addition to mitigation, given the existing emission levels in the atmosphere, also adaptation is needed. In adaptation work, particularly the significance of local and regional solutions and bottom-up approaches has been emphasized.
It’s been estimated that one of the problems concerning regional and local climate action is lack of knowledge on climate change and its impacts on those geographical scales. Whereas it is always timely to discuss science-policy nexus and factors that make scientific research successful in influencing policy, in recent times there has been more discussion on co-production of knowledge or “making sense together” by public engagement. Indeed, in addition to scaling climate projections to serve regional knowledge needs, for sense-making on the societal impacts of climate change, collaborative approaches and public engagement methods are needed.
Collaborative strategic planning processes have been receiving increasing attention during the recent years as an emerging method to plan adaptation measures on regional (i.e. sub-national) level. This paper discusses the role of scientific and other knowledges in the production of regionalized knowledge on the community- or region-specific impacts of climate change through a case study of the Regional Climate Change Strategy 2030 of Finnish Lapland. The collaborative strategic planning process served as a laboratory in which scientific projections on climate change were elaborated by practitioners such as reindeer herders, tourism entrepreneurs and experts of nature conservation and forestry as well as local and regional politicians and NGOs and assembled into several new “facts” stating the intentions concerning the vision for 2030.
The planning process of Lapland’s Regional Climate Change Strategy 2030 showed that scientific knowledge is in a central position in understanding climate change, but the region-specific impacts needed to be associated with the region’s specific features such as livelihood structure, regional development needs and adaptive capacity. However, climate change could also be used as a justification for political goals without a real justification by climate change viewpoints.
Among the proposed adaptation actions was, for instance, building the Kemihaara water reservoir in Eastern Lapland for flood protection in Rovaniemi city. As a technical solution suggested in the strategy process to solve the supposedly increasing flood risks, the long-term project of the water reservoir was revisited and re-assembled. However, the fact-making on the water reservoir faced dissidence as the regionalized climate projections did not support the assumption of increasing flood risks due to increasing precipitation. Still, increasing production of hydroelectric power was seen important for climate mitigation and for regional economy through cleaner industrial processes. Moreover, also the significance of forests as carbon sinks and sources of biofuels were emphasized as regional solutions. Climate engineering was not considered as a solution to climate change as it was seen as something beyond the region’s sphere of decision-making.
