Browsing by Subject "Reilu sopeutuminen"

This thesis examines just climate adaptation to climate change at the river Kokemäenjoki in Southwest Finland. Climate change will significantly change flood risks in Finland. Säpilänniemi adjustment stream is a flood risk management and climate change adaptation measure designed to mitigate flood risks in the area. The adjustment stream is expected to have effects on the flood risks of the entire river area. In particular, the adjustment stream is thought to be important in winter flood situations, which are increasing due to climate change. There are also some disadvantages associated with the planned adjustment stream such as the negative effects on a protected Natura2000-area upstream. The thesis is situated in the field of social scientific environmental research and delves into the themes of just climate policy. There is a great need for research that looks at just practices of climate change adaptation, because the challenges brought by climate change require significant adaptation measures. Adaptation measures are prone to an uneven distribution of harms and benefits, which is why the study of just adaptation is important. Adaptation planning opens up opportunities to reduce current vulnerabilities and promote just adaptation. Climate justice refers to the social and environmental effects on equality and justice that result from climate change or climate policy. In academic literature, climate justice is often understood as a combination of recognition, procedural and distributive justice. Climate justice opens possibilities to plan and examine just adaptation that takes unequally distributed justice effects into account. The research method used in this thesis is narrative analysis. Narrative analysis is a framework that can be used to study different groups' perceptions of the same events. The presupposition is that people build both events and relationships between things in speech and text in the form of narratives. Political processes and different policy practices can also follow the structure of a narrative. The data of the thesis consists of focus group interviews conducted in the fall of 2022 and the river Kokemäenjoki flood risk management plan for 2022-2027. The topic is approached through two research questions: i) What policy narratives emerge from the material? and ii) How is climate justice understood in the narratives? Three narratives were found from the data. The narrative of authorities is the narrative that dominates the data and defines the flood risk management and measures in the area. The narrative of the residents challenges the assumptions about management made in the authorities' narrative. The third narrative is the narrative of municipalities. The results of the study reveal that the case of Kokemäenjoki and Säpilänniemi adjustment stream have typical challenges of just adaptation. Narratives' understandings of climate-just flood risk management vary, and in particular procedural justice is perceived in different ways between the narratives. A climate just adaptation could be enhanced by strengthening participatory processes of flood risk management with the help of municipal actors in the case study area.