PIK Biennial Report 2000-2001 - Potsdam Institute for Climate ...

nets curve: with ongoing economic development the
environmental impacts and damage increase in a first
phase, peak at some time and decline thereafter due to
gains in economic efficiency and an increased environmental
awareness of consumers. This idea crucially
depends on the evolution of lifestyles and the consump-
GLOREM
Global Water Resource Modelling and Managing
Project speaker: Uwe Haberlandt
PIK project members: Thomas Beckmann, Axel
Bronstert, Andreas Güntner, Valentina Krysanova,
Zbigniew Kundzewicz, Matthias Lüdeke, Lucas Menzel,
Stephen Sitch, Martin Welp.
Population growth, the overall increase in water consumption,
and climate change are some of the driving
forces causing water stress. For these and other reasons,
fresh water is becoming an ever-more limited, and sometimes
even contested, global resource. In many climate
models and climate impact studies the assessment of
freshwater resources and their management by social
actors and systems is an underdeveloped issue, however.
The GLOREM pilot project was launched in order to
close this gap.
It had three main purposes: (a) to review approaches for
global freshwater resources modelling and management;
tion patterns induced by them. Therefore, we consider
the study of lifestyles an important step towards answering
the research questions of the EUROPA project. To
perform such an assessment, we plan, e.g., to model the
dynamics of car passenger transport and car use induced
by different scenarios of lifestyle patterns.
(b) to define research requirements in the TOPIK framework
related to global water; and (c) to develop a scientific
concept and a specific proposal for a regular water
project at PIK.
Sub-groups reviewed global water availability models,
studies on global water use and different types of criticality
measures in global water assessments. One sub-group
systematized management options related to global
water problems and further elaborated the link between
the Syndrome approach (cf SYNAPSE in this report) and
water management. The project identified crucial limitations
and missing components in current modelling
efforts, and the group suggested that future water-related
research at PIK should in the first step focus on water
for agriculture and the food trade, and the implications
of land cover changes and human use on water
resources.
BEAR
Biodiversitiy and Nature Protection Enhancement through Participatory Action Research
Project speaker: Susanne Stoll-Kleemann
PIK project members: Fritz Reusswig, Julia Schwarzkopf,
Martin Welp, Volker Wenzel, Birgit Soete.
The biosphere is not only a bio-geophysical reality, it is a
social reality as well. The BEAR project treats the biosphere
and its protection from a social science viewpoint,
following two major lines of research. First, we
investigated nature conservation areas in Germany and
South Africa as social settings, looking for organizationrelated
and communication problems in protection strategies.
In a second line, we focused upon "nature" and "nature
conservation" as social constructs and asked how these
constructs are linked to different social groups within
Germany. The lifestyle concept, common in sociology
and marketing research, was used here in order to build a
typology of eight lifestyle groups and to identify their
different preferred views of nature and nature protection.
The lifestyle research is funded by the German Federal
Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für
Naturschutz, BfN). We discovered a communication gap
between conservationists and the general public. Conservationists
- often natural scientists by training - tend to
focus upon scientific and moral arguments when it
comes to justifying the necessity for nature conservation,
whereas society prefers a (cultural) identity and sustainable
use point of view.
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