Future Narratives
Future Narratives is a collaboration between Nordland Research Institute (NRI), CICERO, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), and the Kola Science center (KSC).
Prosjektfakta
The aim of the project is to develop a process for understanding what future changes may influence this region economically, environmentally and socially within the next 30-50 years. Its overall objective is to enable more informed, timely and responsive decision making in a rapidly changing Arctic by linking knowledge of different scientific disciplines with that of local and regional actors and challenges to ensure relevance and local, regional and sector-specific ownership and engagement; and developing an approach that facilitates comparability between different studies, across regions and across sectors.
In the northern parts of Europe, rapid climate change, price fluctuations in global resource markets and geopolitical changes add uncertainty to local and regional planning, especially when the time horizon spans beyond the next few years. At the same time, the costs of making the wrong choices can be high. A first step in managing uncertainty is to get a sense of the range of different future developments that could be possible. The project invites local actors and decision makers at different levels (municipal , regional, sectorial and national) to take part in a process aimed at building regionally relevant future narratives in the Barents region, based on the concerns and knowledge of people living and working in the region.
The project develops local and regional future narratives for locations in the Arctic, based on interdisciplinarity and co-production. The novelty of the project is its approach, which in a systematic way links new global climate- and socio-economic pathways (RCPs and SSPs) with local and regional voices and perceptions. The narrative approach is used in three community- workshops in the Barents region (in Sweden, Russia and Norway), allowing for comparison across regions and sectors. Using very different Arctic settings (inland, coastal, different economies and policies), the results will give input to processes across the Barents region and the Arctic through ongoing Arctic Council activities.
