SEI to co-lead new Centre of Excellence on Nordic adaptation

Friday, 19 November 2010 11:52

A five-year initiative to boost Nordic collaboration on strategic adaptation research.

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NordForsk, a Nordic organisation with responsibility for cooperation on research and researcher training in the Nordic region, has decided, on behalf of the Top-Level Research Initiative, to support an SEI co-led bid for a five-year Centre of Excellence on adaptation in the Nordic countries.

State-of-the-art contributions
The Centre of Excellence, called 'NORD-STAR' (Nordic Strategic Adaptation Research) is a collaboration between organisations from all five Nordic countries. From Sweden it involves SEI, Linköping University and Chalmers University.

Professor Michael Goodsite of the Danish National Environmental Research Institute at Aarhus University will direct the Centre of Excellence, with SEI researcher Richard Klein as deputy director and chief scientist. The total budget will be NOK 30 million.

"NORD-STAR will advance the science and knowledge base for two types of adaptation: adaptation to climate change, and adaptation to climate policy. These two types of adaptation are typically analysed separately, even though, for example, farmers, architects and energy planners cannot separate the effects of climate change and climate policy in their decisions", Richard Klein says.

Exploring new types of dialogue
NORD-STAR will operate on the interface of science, practice and policy. It will explore new types of dialogue between research and society, focusing initially on land-use change and energy transitions.

"Taking a comprehensive and strategic approach to climate adaptation requires NORD-STAR to put a strong emphasis on knowledge integration, communication and visualisation. There is a widely recognised need to reconcile the supply of and demand for research in science and innovation policy; NORD-STAR will address this need by defining and using effective and relevant intermediaries (knowledge brokers) in translation processes between academics and practitioners," Klein says.