Lasse Peltonen

The ability of Nordic countries to adapt to climate change: assessing adaptive capacity at the regional level

Adaptation to the impacts of climate change has become a concern in the Nordic countries. Regional responses to climate change impacts are considered to be crucial since they are likely to target specific vulnerabilities with concrete and feasible adaptation measures. The ability of the region to respond to climate change is determined to a large extent by its adaptive capacity that consists of economic, social and political capacity, as well as infrastructure and technological potential. This paper assesses the generic adaptive capacity of Nordic regions by using a set of indicators that reflect five determinants of adaptive capacity. The results of the assessments are presented in maps that illustrate that Nordic regions have high capacity but there are also significant differences between and within countries. Finally, this article also discusses arguments for and against the use of these kinds of assessments in policy-making, and the implications of this for the Nordic countries.

Regional challenges of climate change adaptation in Finland: examining the ability to adapt in the absence of national level steering

Climate change adaptation presents a challenge for all levels of governance. As impacts of climate change are most acutely felt at the regional and local level, there is a need to understand the limits and barriers of the design and implementation of adaptation measures on these levels. The aim of this paper is to focus on the regional level in Finland in order to identify the limits and barriers to regional implementation of climate change adaptation in the absence of steering from the national level. In order to do this, the paper draws on two empirical studies on adaptation within the regions of Uusimaa and Pirkanmaa in Finland. The paper describes the manner in which voluntary initiatives at the regional and local level have emerged, and regions have acted on adaptation in the absence of clear steering from the national level.

Defensive routines in land use policy steering in Finnish urban regions

Land use planning practices in different municipalities and urban regions in Finland vary substantially, as do attitudes towards land ownership and land use policy. Consequently, inter-municipal cooperation in strategic land use planning is often weak, despite central government efforts such as the introduction of the PARAS Act in 2007, which exhorts municipalities in the urban regions to consolidate or cooperate. However, governmental steering has been vague on most sensitive and pragmatic land use policy issues such as planning and policy tools to control dispersed development patterns leading to urban sprawl. This article examines the challenges of consistent steering of land use practices by presenting observations from follow-up studies of five Finnish urban regions, all in the first stage of implementing the PARAS Act. The analysis reveals that mixed messages and defensive routines are preventing effective political debate on core issues. These defences are fostered by the vagueness of central government policy. Since these core issues have not been brought up in the legislation, they are now being tackled – or ignored – at the local level in an unpredictable manner.

Environmental justice for the governance of aquatic environments

ABSTRACT Environmental justice sheds light on the distributive and procedural aspects of planning and decision-making. We examined the challenges arising from the perspective of environmental justice on multi-level and participatory environmental governance by exploring the governance of aquatic environments in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. We found three main challenges and potential responses to them. First, even though most of Helsinki’s shoreline is free and/or accessible by road and accordingly used actively by people for recreational purposes, many parts of the shoreline are perceived as inaccessible, reflecting a need to combine factual and perceived accessibility of aquatic environments in detail during the planning processes and to discuss reasons for possible discrepancies between these two. Second, there was a remarkable seasonal variation in the use of aquatic environments, so more attention should be paid to social-demographic factors explaining the distribution of the use of urban nature. Third, it seems to be difficult to capture the variety of perceptions of people and to integrate them into planning and decision-making processes even on a local scale, and this challenge is likely even more pronounced on higher levels of planning and governance. Thus, better integration of regional and local-scale planning procedures should be encouraged. Building on these observations, we conclude that integration of procedural and distributive environmental justice into the practices of the governance of aquatic environments could remarkably decrease unwanted trade-offs and potential conflicts in their use and management.