Joanna Morawska (p)

David Castells-quintana

Territorial Responsible Research and Innovation Fostering Innovative Climate Action (TeRRIFICA) emerged to influence climate change adaptation and mitigation policies (CCA&M) and foster competence for CCA&M in six European regions. One focus is responsible research and innovation (RRI) and the co-creation of knowledge. In a transdisciplinary partnership, the H2020 project TeRRIFICA brought together three research institutions, three non-profit organizations, one public association of universities and one public institution for science promotion. The main project goals were: to involve citizens in agenda-setting processes corresponding to climate change challenges; to develop Climate Change Adaptation Plans that woul lead to institutional and governance change; to develop, test and evaluate concrete actions(pilots) focused on mitigation of and adapting to climate change issues; to design and implement a crowd-mapping tool for identification of climate change effects; to enhance the Responsible Research & Innovation principles in local and regional policy.
The climate change challenges affect regional innovation systems that need to develop new approaches, new forms of collective actions between public and private stakeholders as well as new solutions with the aim to address social challenges through innovation. The TeRRIFICA project focused on those interactions, using the Quintuple Helix model approach that adds the fifth dimension – the Environment, and sets the stage for sustainability priorities and considerations so that nature is central and equivalent component of and for knowledge production and innovation.
The presentation will focus on the following aspects: 1. the crowd-mapping process and its results from six pilot regions; 2. the co-creation process within climate actions in Poznan Agglomeration as a case study of involving citizens in CCA&M plan. The findings are the reference points for climate actions: co-created innovative projects implemented in a partnerships of local communities. The presentation will focus on the role, competence, and scope of activity of relevant stakeholders within climate action projects; it will also refer to identified needs for action, barriers, and drivers for climate action, as perceived by different stakeholders and how they were address in a real-life climate action projects.

Lisa Sella (p), Francesca Silvia Rota, Elena Ragazzi, Andrea Scartazza, Patrizia, Adamo, Maddalena Pennisi

Joanna Morawska

In sustainable development studies, the issue of the critical zone (CZ) ecosystem functioning has gained increased attention among regional scientists. The CZ concept identifies the stratigraphic section of the Earth’s surface, which provides all the essential elements for supporting life (Xu Liu, 2017). By its constituent components (vegetation, soil, water, and rocks), the CZ provides many essential ecosystem services (Field et al., 2015), thus playing a fundamental role in the perspective of local and global sustainability.
However, its embracement in regional studies and policies is problematic, principally due to the different geographical scales used to analyse the CZ in the different disciplines. In fact, regional studies usually collect data at the micro-urban scale, at least. Conversely, natural scientists generally study the CZ either via field/in situ measurements on very small areas (around 1-5 ha each), or via remote sensing satellite data.
The contribution illustrates how these limits have been faced within the international project ABRESO, funded by the Belmont Forum. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the project studies the impact of the abandonment of traditional activities in the Alpine area on the ecosystem services provisioning, such as biodiversity conservation and soil sustainability, as well as the actual perception of the ongoing change by different stakeholders and its subsequent integration into local land management practices and policies.
More specifically, advanced techniques that integrate Earth Observation, biogeochemical analyses, and socio-economic investigation are used in the Italian sites to understand in which extent geo-biophysical and social landscapes reciprocally interact. The contribution illustrates the methodological solutions adopted. In particular, the environmental variables collected for ecosystem monitoring and to study and upscale the ongoing dynamics in the CZ include snow cover and phenology parameters, soil organic carbon, and land use change maps extracted from time series of satellite imagery. Then, the observed processes will be compared to the perception of different stakeholders (local population, policy makers, tourists, business keepers, etc.) to unveil new insights into the way land use change in the mountain areas influence and is influenced by the local land management practices and policies.

David Castells-quintana (p), Thomas McDermott

Lisa Sella

Climate change is already impacting several development outcomes, including economic growth, human health and mortality, agricultural productivity and even conflict. Moreover, the impact of climate change is expected to be unevenly distributed across locations and population groups. In particular, the worse effects of climate change are expected to be felt in low-income countries. Similarly, within countries, the most vulnerable to these effects are typically low-income regions and households. While the literature to date has provided evidence of the between-countries inequality-increasing effect of global warming, it has not yet done so for inequality within countries. In this paper, we empirically explore the connection between climate change and income distribution within countries. To do so, we build a global panel dataset combining gridded data on climate variables with gridded population data, country-level data on several income inequality measures (including interpersonal Gini coefficients and indices of concentration of income), gridded data on night-time lights to construct measures of spatial inequality, and data on several development outcomes. Using panel-data econometric techniques, we find a clear positive and statistically significant relationship between rising temperatures and increases in within-country inequality, both interpersonal and spatial. The role of rising temperatures is robust to a range of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques. Finally, we explore potential mechanisms behind this temperature-inequality relationship.