ateam - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

ATEAM final report Section 5 and 6 (2001-2004) 50
and forest management. Nevertheless a recurring theme during the dialogue was to learn just how
complex human-environment interactions are in a context of EU, national and regional policies and
under socio-economic constraints. To give one example, the diversity of forest ownership and forest use
in terms of area owned, financial relevance relative to other income sources of the stakeholder and
management goals was even greater than anticipated. Forest owners can rely on forest ecosystem
services for almost all or next to none of their income, sometimes independent of the area of forest
owned. Forests are managed to optimise many outcomes, ranging from commercial use, over
recreational to spiritual meaning. Here our choice of indicators (i.e. wood production, carbon stored in
vegetation and soil, species turnover, tree species distribution) fall short of the information needs of all
possible stakeholders. These complexities were discussed during stakeholder interactions and explored
especially in the land use modelling work. Two detailed reports on forest policy have been produced
(Kankaanpää and Carter 2004ab, see Annex 2).
We conclude that our assessment was both valuable and useful for stakeholders and relevant in
scientific terms. We also conclude that future analysis can be based on our concepts and results and for
some sectors should especially target local scales and shorter time scales. Ecosystem modelling should
continue to mature into human-environment-system modelling, by accounting for management and
decision making in the socio-economic and policy context of the relevant stakeholders. This can be
greatly facilitated by continued stakeholder interaction, making use of as well as advancing the tools
and the stakeholder network developed in ATEAM.
6.2.5 Integrating potential impacts and adaptive capacity into maps of vulnerability (WP1, 5
and 6)
Principal investigators: Marc J. Metzger, Dagmar Schröter, Rik Leemans, Wolfgang Cramer
The term vulnerability stems from everyday language – the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the
undesirable state of being open to attack or damage”. At the time the ATEAM proposal was submitted to
the EU, researchers from different disciplines used the term ‘vulnerability’ intuitively as the risk of harm
to something they, or somebody else values caused by global change. Since then, the concept of
vulnerability has been debated in the scientific community, with considerable contributions by ATEAM
researchers. By now a common definition of vulnerability, as well as an assessment concept have
emerged (Turner et al. 2003, Schröter et al. 2004). ATEAM defines vulnerability as the degree to which
an ecosystem service is sensitive to global environmental change and the degree to which the sector
that relies on the service is unable to adapt to the changes (Metzger and Schröter 2004). Hence,
potential impacts (the resultant of exposure and sensitivity) and adaptive capacity constitute a region’s
vulnerability. Table 13 gives an overview of important terminology developed in ATEAM related to
vulnerability, with examples for the sectors agriculture and carbon storage.
In Figure 38 we illustrate how the terms presented in Table 13 fit into the ATEAM vulnerability
assessment. The future scenarios (exposure) feed into the ecosystem models, which determine future
ecosystem service supply, i.e. potential impacts. The change in potential impacts compared to baseline
conditions will be expressed in a stratified potential impact index. The socio-economic scenarios are
translated into a generic adaptive capacity index, which can be combined with the potential impact index
to map vulnerability.