Dr. Dominik Braunschweiger

Finanzielle Anreize für proaktive Massnahmen vielversprechend, Skepsis bei Gastbaumarten

Vor gut einem Jahr nahmen die Mitglieder von WaldAargau an einer Umfrage der WSL, zum Thema «Anpassung der Waldbewirtschaftung an den Klimawandel», teil. Gerne präsentieren wir hier die wichtigsten Ergebnisse daraus.

The impacts of climate change threaten forest ecosystems and the services they provide. Policies and measures to make forests more resilient to climate-change-induced disturbances are needed, but the success of such efforts depends on their acceptance among forest owners and managers. Based on a discrete choice experiment survey among Swiss forest owners and managers in the canton of Bern, we analysed whether respondents prefer (i) proactive over reactive interventions, (ii) advanced/natural regeneration over plantings, (iii) native over non-native tree species, and (iv) the role governmental payment schemes play in these decisions. About one-third of the respondents belong to the class of forest managers and owners that are open to a transition strategy including proactive interventions and non-native tree species. Two-thirds of the forest owners and managers prefer a reactive restoration approach after disturbances and management that relies on native tree species. The amount of financial support plays a decisive role in the willingness of most respondents to accept adaptation measures. These results confirm the feasibility of diversifying the policy support toolbox to enable more proactive climate-adaptive forest management.

Übergeordnete Konzepte und Strategien zur Anpassung an die Folgen der Erderhitzung sind weniger objektiv, als es den Anschein hat. Eine stärkere Auseinandersetzung mit den gesellschaftlichen und politischen Werten, die die planerische Klimawandelanpassung vor Ort leiten, tut Not.

Climate change impacts vary wildly across different geographical contexts and their effects are primarily felt on the local level, generating demand for local solutions. The local level plays a key role in the adaptation to climate change. Nevertheless, in most European countries adaptation has yet to be integrated comprehensively into local policy agendas. To further our understanding of this slow pace of local adaptation progress, we study 21 Swiss Alpine municipalities exposed to a variety of natural hazards and issues exacerbated by local climate change impacts. Building on established research on local natural hazard management and climate change adaptation, we expect four factors to play decisive roles, either on their own or in combination with each other: Past extreme events, risk exposure, perceived climate risk and existing adaptation policies at superordinate levels. We test these expectations using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). We find that significant past extreme events and high perceived climate risk come close to being necessary conditions for local adaptation measures. High perceived climate risk on its own is also a sufficient condition for local adaptation measures to be taken while its absence is sufficient for no local adaptation measures to be taken. Thus, the importance of climate risk perception exceeds our expectation as it has clearly been revealed to be the most important factor. Future research should focus on disentangling different levels of public risk perception further and investigate the role different levels of perception or acceptance among different actor groups play in climate policy decisions.

Städte sind von den Folgen des Klimawandels besonders stark betroffen. Obwohl das Problembewusstsein in der Schweiz vorhanden ist, werden Anpassungsmassnahmen oftmals noch ungenügend umgesetzt. Gefragt wären unter anderem klarere Zuständigkeiten und explizite gesetzliche Vorgaben.

Ein europäischer Ländervergleich zeigt, dass statt der traditionellen Schadensbewältigung neue, proaktive Ansätze für einen resilienten und resistenten Wald nötig sind. Die Förderprogramme zur Bewältigung von Extremereignissen in den beiden Schweizer Kantonen Bern und Aargau entwickeln sich ebenfalls in diese Richtung. Die Akzeptanz verschiedener Ansätze der Klimawandelanpassung im Wald wurde mit einer Befragung untersucht. Viele Waldbesitzer und -bewirtschafter gehen reaktiv vor und setzen auf einheimische Baumarten. Ein stärker proaktives Vorgehen auf gefährdeten Waldflächen, auch unter Berücksichtigung von Gastbaumarten, ist dennoch für einen erheblichen Teil der Befragten denkbar. Dabei spielt die Höhe der finanziellen Förderung für die meisten die entscheidende Rolle.

Climate change and the associated increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events pose new challenges for forest management. Research shows that instead of traditional disturbance and damage management, new, proactive approaches and comprehensive, long-term risk management are needed to adapt forests to the impacts of climate change. Implementing this is difficult and requires intensive collaboration between forest owners and managers and the state. This paper examines the development of supporting programs in the two Swiss cantons of Bern and Aargau over the past 30 years. It goes on to discuss the main outstanding issues as well as the corresponding options for action by the state based on a survey of forest owners, forest managers and foresters. While many still prefer traditional forest management approaches and indigenous tree species, subsidizing a mix of indigenous and foreign tree species well-adapted to climate change should prove fruitful. In this case, the amount of state subsidies is the decisive factor for most respondents - making them a powerful instrument to support change.

Adaptation to the impacts of climate change has become an increasingly important policy field in recent years, but it is complicated due to ambiguous responsibilities. To ensure the coherence of adaptation policies, cooperation is necessary between sectors as well as between administrative levels. As such, fragmentation between both sectors and levels is a huge challenge for the successful formulation and implementation of climate change adaptation policies. Bridging actors who coordinate actions across levels and sectors play an important role in overcoming this challenge. Through means of social network analysis, I investigate which actors occupy key bridging roles in the multi-level and federalist arrangement of Swiss climate change adaptation governance. I analyse a two-mode network of actors and climate change adaptation measures, conducting a complete inventory of all measures and policies carried out in the context of the Swiss adaptation strategy as well as all actors involved in their design, funding and implementation. I find that federal governmental actors occupy the most important bridging roles. However, for the most part, they seem more focused on building cross-sectoral ties than on building cross-level ties. The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) stands out as the one national authority that managed to establish almost as many cross-level ties as cross-sectoral ties through the coordination of an adaptation funding programme. Thus, while adaptation measures will primarily be implemented on the municipal level, higher level actors still have a vital role to play in promoting municipal efforts, fostering collaboration and reducing fragmentation.

With some level of climate change now inevitable, climate policy around the world has evolved in recent decades to include adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Most industrialized countries have formulated national adaptation strategies to meet this challenge. However, the implementation of on‐the‐ground measures is lagging. To analyze the implementation process and possible reasons for the implementation gap, we take a closer look at how the integration of adaptation goals into various sectoral policies - often called mainstreaming - has been handled on different administrative levels in Switzerland. Going beyond traditional compilations of barriers to climate change adaptation, we analyze the use of six different mainstreaming strategies across cases and levels and the reasons for their success or lack thereof. We find that different actors at all administrative levels have successfully employed programmatic mainstreaming in combination with inter‐organizational mainstreaming to foster horizontal cooperation. We call this strategy cooperative mainstreaming. Some pioneers even managed to channel their successes into advances in regulatory mainstreaming. However, the lack of systematic regulatory and directed mainstreaming on the national and cantonal levels largely limits adaptation actions on lower levels to those cases where the major impetus derives from extreme events or proactive individuals on the ground. We conclude that the adaptation implementation gap in Switzerland largely stems from the lack of political commitment to promoting local adaptation at the national and cantonal levels.

In the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) crisis, uncertain and experimental forms of governance have emerged. Administrative routines and established management techniques have dissolved amid emergency actions and management by the state of exception. We refer to these emerging governance forms as transformative governance. Discussing examples from Switzerland, we illustrate how policy responses to COVID‐19 reflect transformative governance. These examples raise four issues that characterize transformative governance research and practice: (i) the evidence base of policy‐making; (ii) the role of the state in transformative governance; (iii) the potential of experimental governance; and (iv) the paradigms driving policy change. Our study demonstrates that these issues imply different opportunities and risks of transformative governance, which we discuss in detail.

Ein neues, interaktives Tool der WSL zeigt, welche Governance-Strukturen und -Prozesse die Anpassung an den Klimawandel im Alpenraum charakterisieren.

Landscape quality has become a fundamental issue in the development of renewable energy (henceforth abbreviated RE) projects. Rapid technological advances in RE production and distribution, coupled with changing policy frameworks, bring specific challenges during planning in order to avoid degradation of landscape quality. The current work provides a comprehensive review on RE landscapes and the impacts of RE systems on landscape for most European countries. It is based on a review by an interdisciplinary international team of experts of empirical research findings on landscape impacts of RE from thirty-seven countries that have participated in the COST Action TU1401 Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality (RELY).

Climate change severely affects Alpine regions. Adaptation to climate change is needed in order to deal with these impacts, but the implementation of national adaptation strategies is inhibited by multiple obstacles. Regional strategic frameworks are just emerging, adaptation is of little priority to local agendas and policy mainstreaming is limited on all administrative levels. This paper provides a better understanding of the governance of adaptation to climate change in Switzerland, an example of a federal system with a strong focus on subnational levels and multilevel governance. We conceptualize governance as a network of policies, measures, actors and knowledge, and visualize their interactions using D3.js, a data-driven JavaScript library. The findings illustrate the typical division of labour in federal multilevel governance systems. The national level provides a strategic framework and funding and conducts coordinating measures at subnational levels, especially the local-level implementation of concrete measures. Conducting comparable mappings for other countries would allow interesting comparisons and insights into common barriers and opportunities to adaptation to climate change.

Wenn Hochmoore vertrocknen, leiden die Biodiversität und auch das Klima. Denn intakte Hochmoore speichern CO₂, entwässerte Hochmoore setzen CO₂ frei. Die WSL zeigt Kosten und Nutzen einer Wiedervernässung auf.