Browsing by discipline "Environmental change and policy"
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(2017)The impacts of climate change are going to be significant in Finland, thus the need to adapt is inevitable. Municipalities are the key to adaptation because the impacts of climate change are met locally. Several cities have developed their measures to climate impacts. However, multiple barriers may hinder the planning and implementation of adaptation measures in the cities. The purpose of this research is to identify and overcome the barriers in urban climate change adaptation in the City of Helsinki. The main data of this research was collected in a workshop and it consists of the blank form replies collected with 6-3-5 method and focus group discussions. 11 civil servants from the City of Helsinki who deal with adaptation issues in their daily work participated in the workshop. The participants identified the barriers and evaluated the most important ones in the workshop: lack of cost-benefit analyses, rivalry of the resources with other interests, lack of urgency regarding adaptation, lack of information, fragmentation of the organization and unclear roles and responsibilities. Identifying the barriers does not solely promote the resilience of the cities but it is an important step in the development of adaptation work. It is essential to seek possible solutions to overcome the identified barriers. Six solutions that can tackle simultaneously several barriers emerged from the data gathered in the workshop: costbenefit analyses, increasing training and information, concrete examples, increasing co-operation, clear modes of action and responsibilities and the support and commitment of the management. With these solutions, the City of Helsinki has the possibility to simultaneously overcome several barriers that were identified in this research. To conclude, the responsibility of climate change adaptation should be clarified in the new city organization and silos between different sectors should be addressed, if possible. It would be useful to utilise the multi-criteria decision analysis in prioritising and argumenting of the adaptation measures in the city. As additional conclusions, it seems that improved co-operation with the universities and research institutions, and legislation indicating clear roles and responsibilities in terms of adaptation might benefit the adaptation work in the City of Helsinki. As for the need for further research, the analytical framework developed and utilized in this research needs to be tested in other case studies also.
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(2017)Different parties such as industry, tourism and research are more and more interested in arctic regions. Tourism is one of the biggest source of livelihood there and growing all the time. Arctic nature is vulnerable and there are indigenous peoples living there. Their way of life is based on natural sources of livelihood such as reindeer breeding. Tourist industry like all the other actions in the region should be socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. So it is important to do research on problems to reconcile different forms of industries and source of livelihoods. The purpose of this thesis is to study possibilities of tourist guidance to solve problems to reconcile reindeer husbandry and tourist industry in municipality of Enontekiö in Finland. It has been noticed in the research of ecotourism that it is possible to influence tourists’ behavior and attitudes by guidance if it is carried out in the right way. This is the reason why my interest is directed to the role of guidance to solve the problems. My research questions are: 1) What kind of problems there are between tourist industry and reindeer husbandry? 2) How is it possible to decrease the harm that tourist industry causes to reindeer husbandry by tourist guidance? 3) How the tourist guidance should be improved? I have done reviews on earlier studies and reports about problems between tourist industry and reindeer husbandry and also about the role of guidance in nature tourism management. Based on these reviews I have proposed a hypothesis how it could be possible to decrease the harm that tourist industry causes to reindeer husbandry by tourist guidance. To test my hypothesis I collected interviews of 15 tourism entrepreneurs and 5 representatives of Metsähallitus. I used the methods of qualitative content analysis to analyze the data. It came out that the biggest problems between tourist industry and reindeer husbandry are disturbance of the peace of pasture, decreasing pasture area, equity in land-use decision-making, and the willingness among the tourism entrepreneurs and reindeer herders to reconcile the source of livelihoods. Tourists do not know much about reindeer husbandry. It is possible to decrease some the harm that tourist industry causes by guidance when it is carried out as recommended in the studies. The role of guidance in decreasing the harms is not very remarkable, because the biggest harms caused by tourist industry are not outcomes of tourists’ thoughtlessness or behavior against rules that could be decreased by guidance. The best education and guidance is given in reindeer farm visits and in guided tours organized by program service companies. The participants of those programs are mainly foreigners even though the majority of tourists in Enontekiö are Finns. Their main source of information is the website of Metsähallitus. The most efficient way to increase tourists’ knowledge would probably be influencing the content of websites of Metsähallitus and marketing of reindeer farm visits and guided tours to Finns.
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