Characterising vulnerability of the elderly to climate change in the Nordic region

Abstract

Elderly people are known to be more vulnerable than the general population to a range of weatherrelated hazards such as heat waves, icy conditions and cold periods. In the Nordic region, some of these hazards are projected to change their frequency and intensity in the future, while at the same time strong increases are projected in the proportion of elderly in the population. This paper reports results from three projects studying the potential impacts of climate change on elderly people in the Nordic region. An interactive web-based tool has been developed for mapping and combining indicators of climate change vulnerability of the elderly, by municipality, across three Nordic countries: Finland, Norway and Sweden. The tool can also be used for projecting temperaturerelated mortality in Finland under different projections of future climate. The approach to vulnerability mapping differs from most previous studies in which researchers selected the indicators to combine into an index. Here, while researchers compile data on indicators that can be accessed in the mapping tool, the onus is on the users of the tool to decide which indicators are of interest and whether to map them individually or as combined indices.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10113-014-0688-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. 123Reg Environ Change (2016) 16:43-58 DOI 10.1007 Stakeholders with responsibility for the care and welfare of the elderly were engaged in the study through interviews and a workshop. They affirmed the usefulness of the prototype mapping tool for raising awareness about climate change as a potential risk factor for the elderly and offered suggestions on potential refinements, which have now been implemented. These included adding background information on possible adaptation measures for ameliorating the impacts of extreme temperatures, and improved representation of uncertainties in projections of future exposure and adaptive capacity.

Assessing agricultural vulnerability to climate change in the Nordic countries – an interactive geovisualization approach

“…Providing users with basic functionality for assessing agricultural vulnerability, it comprises three choropleth maps that display the exposure/ sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability of agricultural livelihoods. However, the final version of this web-based tool does not include agriculture but focuses solely on the vulnerability of the elderly to climate change (Carter et al 2016).…”

Towards a diagnostic adaptation science

“…Slobbe et al (2014) analyse future impacts of low-flow events in the Rhine river basin and identify climate risks and adaptation options with respect to salmon restoration policy and shipping. For Scandinavia, Carter et al (2014) identify climate-related health risks for elderly people in three Nordic countries by developing a vulnerability index composed of exposure and adaptive capacity indicators.…”

Climate vulnerability assessment methodology: Agriculture under climate change in the Nordic region

“…Opach and Rød 2013;Carter et al 2016). As AgroExplore has been developed to fit this specific research design, it is a complex tool that targets agricultural experts and participatory research processes, which makes the tool unique in terms of its highly interactive features.…”

“…Most of these tools do not enable sophisticated interaction with the data and are therefore used mainly to view various types of climate-related data . Several tools address vulnerability, risks, and hazards, but few of them support data exploration and new knowledge creation (cf., Tate et al 2011;Opach and Rød 2013;Neuvonen et al 2015;Carter et al 2016). Because of the wide-ranging confusion regarding the conceptualization of vulnerability (Ionescu et al 2009) and the extensive range of methods used to assess it, geographic visualization tool developers must be cautious in endeavouring to support spatial planning or to explore and represent climate change interaction mechanisms (Preston et al 2011).…”

“…Another visualization technique that could beneficially be included in a visual environment with multiple linked views is the Sankey diagram, a flow diagram in which the widths of the flows represent quantities (Alemasoom et al 2014). A map-based multiple view approach is feasible for visually representing vulnerability data (Opach and Rød 2013), and some examples of studies using such an approach are Rød et al (2014), Neuvonen et al (2015), and Carter et al (2016).…”