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The five Nordic countries span the most northern region for field cultivation in the world. This presents challenges per se , with short growing seasons, long days, and a need for frost tolerance. Climate change has additionally increased risks for micro-droughts and water logging, as well as pathogens and pests expanding northwards. Thus, Nordic agriculture demands crops that are adapted to the specific Nordic growth conditions and future climate scenarios. A focus on crop varieties and traits important to Nordic agriculture, including the unique resource of nutritious wild crops, can meet these needs. In fact, with a future longer growing season due to climate change, the region could contribute proportionally more to global agricultural production. This also applies to other northern regions, including the Arctic. To address current growth conditions, mitigate impacts of climate change, and meet market demands, the adaptive capacity of crops that both perform well in northern latitudes and are more climate resilient has to be increased, and better crop management systems need to be built. This requires functional phenomics approaches that integrate versatile high-throughput phenotyping, physiology, and bioinformatics. This review stresses key target traits, the opportunities of latitudinal studies, and infrastructure needs for phenotyping to support Nordic agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture in the Nordic countries is a sector, where farmers are facing climatic challenges first-hand with little policy guidance on climate change adaptation or climate risk management. Adaptation practices emerging at the farm scale have potentially harmful outcomes that can erode the agricultural sustainability. So far, farm scale decision-making on adaptation measures is scarcely studied, and a thorough assessment of risk perceptions underlying adaptation decision-making is required in the Nordic context to inform adaptation policy planning. In this qualitative case study, the climate risk perceptions of Nordic farmers and agricultural extension officers are examined. As a result, a typology of risk responses is presented, showing three dominant patterns within highly dynamic and contextual adaptation processes at farm scale: risk aversive, opportunity-seeking and experimental. The typology represents the variation within adaptation processes that further stress the need for participatory adaptation policy development in agriculture.

Background. Serious games are gaining increasing prominence in environmental communication research, but their potential to form an integrated part of participatory research approaches is still strikingly understudied. This is particularly the case for applications of interactive digital formats in research on environmental challenges of high complexity, such as climate adaptation, which is a specifically suitable case as it involves complex interaction between climate systems and society, but where the response also involves trade-offs with potentially negative – maladaptive – outcomes. Intervention. This article presents the Maladaptation Game, which was designed to facilitate dialogue about potential negative outcomes of agricultural climate adaptation. Methods. We conducted test sessions with agricultural stakeholders in Finland and Sweden, and analysed quantitative and qualitative, audio-recorded and transcribed, material for opportunities and challenges related to dialogues, engagement, interactivity and experienced relevance. Results. The qualitative analysis of recorded dialogues shows that the Maladaptation Game has potential to support dialogue by challenging players to negotiate between options with negative outcomes. The gameplay itself presents opportunities in terms of creating engagement with options that provoke disagreement and debates between players, as well as interactivity, that players reflected upon as quick and easy, while challenges were related to the experienced relevance, in particular the options provided in the game, and its general framing. Conclusions. The results indicate a need for complementary approaches to this type of game but also suggest the importance of moderation when the game design is aimed at creating dialogue around a complex environmental challenge such as agricultural climate adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture in the Nordic countries is a sector, where farmers are facing climatic challenges first-hand with little policy guidance on climate change adaptation or climate risk management. Adaptation practices emerging at the farm scale have potentially harmful outcomes that can erode the agricultural sustainability. So far, farm scale decision-making on adaptation measures is scarcely studied, and a thorough assessment of risk perceptions underlying adaptation decision-making is required in the Nordic context to inform adaptation policy planning. In this qualitative case study, the climate risk perceptions of Nordic farmers and agricultural extension officers are examined. As a result, a typology of risk responses is presented, showing three dominant patterns within highly dynamic and contextual adaptation processes at farm scale: risk aversive, opportunity-seeking and experimental. The typology represents the variation within adaptation processes that further stress the need for participatory adaptation policy development in agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nordic agriculture must adapt to climate change to reduce vulnerability and exploit potential opportunities. Integrated assessments can identify and quantify vulnerability in order to recognize these adaptation needs. This study presents a geographic visualization approach to support the interactive assessment of agricultural vulnerability to climate change. We have identified requirements for increased transparency and reflexivity in vulnerability assessments, arguing that these can be met by geographic visualization. A conceptual framework to support the integration of geographic visualization for vulnerability assessments has been designed and applied for the development of AgroExplore, an interactive tool for assessing agricultural vulnerability to climate change in Sweden. To open up the black box of composite vulnerability indices, AgroExplore enables the user to select, weight, and classify relevant indicators into sub-indices of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. This enables the exploration of underlying indicators and factors determining vulnerability in Nordic agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sheep grazing is an important part of agriculture in the North Atlantic region, defined here as the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Scotland. This process has played a key role in shaping the landscape and biodiversity of the region, sometimes with major environmental consequences, and has also been instrumental in the development of its rural economy and culture. In this review, we present results of the first interdisciplinary study taking a long-term perspective on sheep management, resource economy and the ecological impacts of sheep grazing, showing that sustainability boundaries are most likely to be exceeded in fragile environments where financial support is linked to the number of sheep produced. The sustainability of sheep grazing can be enhanced by a management regime that promotes grazing densities appropriate to the site and supported by area-based subsidy systems, thus minimizing environmental degradation, encouraging biodiversity and preserving the integrity of ecosystem processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]