NCPNorge: Identifying the drivers of demands for Nature’s Contributions to People
The overall aim of this PhD project is to measure the relative demand for different Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP), including both material and non-material NCP, across Norwegian society and to identify the social drivers of demand for these services.
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This project is part of UiB's Centre for Sustainable Area Management (CeSAM). A major goal of CeSAM is to develop NCPNorge, a widely applicable model that will predict the social impacts of ecosystem change across the whole of Norway. Such an initiative is a major undertaking, and the project needs to be completed in several steps. The first of these, and a major pre-requisite, is the main aim of this project: to quantify which of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) are most demanded by different stakeholders in Norway, in a social-ecological research project. This project will also address the lack of information regarding what drives the demand for ecosystem services, a neglected element of their management.
To address these goals the proposed PhD project will conduct in-person workshops with a wide range of senior local stakeholders in each major social-ecological region of Norway. This will be followed by a larger social survey of a much larger sample of stakeholders from throughout the country in both detailed regional surveys and in the Norwegian Citizen Panel. Additional data will be collected to understand the social and cultural drivers of these demand patterns.
The proposed project involves interdisciplinary collaboration across the CeSAM initiative and will build the foundations of large-scale research platform, while also providing insightful and societally relevant research in its own right.
