Abstract
Climate change in the Arctic is occurring at a rapid rate. In Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the world’s northernmost city, deadly avalanches and permafrost thaw-induced architectural destruction has disrupted local governance norms and responsibilities. In the North Atlantic, the warming ocean temperatures have contributed to a rapid expansion of the mackerel stock which has spurred both geo-political tensions but also tensions at the science-policy interface of fish quota setting. These local climate-induced changes have created a domino-like chain reaction that intensifies through time as a warming Arctic penetrates deeper into responsibilities of governing institutions and science institutions. In face with the increasing uncertain futures of climate-induced changes, policy choices also increase revealing a type of “snowballing” of possible futures facing decision-makers. We introduce a portmanteau-inspired concept called “The Melting Snowball Effect” that encompasses the chain reaction (“domino effect”) that increases the number of plausible scenarios (“snowball effect”) with climate change (melting snow, ice and thawing permafrost). We demonstrate the use of “The Melting Snowball Effect” as a heuristic to create plausible scenarios for deliberative discussions among academics, citizens and policymakers. We apply this heuristic in a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) framework to underscore anticipation, engagement and reflection needed by publics to increase the capacity of democracies to sustainably adapt to climate change. We observe generational differences in discussing future climate scenarios, particularly that the mixed group where three generations were represented had the most diverse and thorough deliberations.
Highlights
IntroductionThe inherent interrelations and complexities of climate-induced changes to fisheries pose huge challenges to the science—society dialogue
How can the different social, economic, political and ecological aspects of climate change be useful for achieving sustainable governance of fisheries in the Arctic and beyond? Can the natural and social sciences integrate their methods to address inherent interdependencies and complexities of climate change? Is it possible for these insights to be discussed among the public, The Melting Snowball Effect and do decision-makers have the capacity to be responsive to public deliberations about climate change? The inherent interrelations and complexities of climate-induced changes to fisheries pose huge challenges to the science—society dialogue
We present the results as three parts: (1) Longyearbyen stakeholder interview results; (2) bio-physicalclimate-economic model (DBEM-effort dynamic model (EDM)) results; and (3) Bergen stakeholder workshop results
Summary
The inherent interrelations and complexities of climate-induced changes to fisheries pose huge challenges to the science—society dialogue There is as such a knowledge gap in how to design a practical and digestible interdisciplinary framework to discuss plausible future scenarios with society and the implications of environmental change to human communities and political structures governing environmental issues globally. The Northeast Atlantic mackerel stock has been growing since 2007 (Nøttestad et al, 2015; Nøttestad, 2016), often attributed to warming waters and increased available prey habitats because of climatic stressors (Gattuso et al, 2015) This increase of the stock has given great returns to the industry in the form of valuable catches. We a see that there are both possible and real geopolitical repercussions to changing fish stocks such as that of the herring as well (Tiller and Nyman, 2017; Harte et al, 2019; Tiller and Dankel, 2019; Tiller et al, 2019)
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