Stockhom Environment Institute (SEI)
The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) bridges science and policy on a range of issues related to environment and development. Climate change and environment are core themes in the SEI strategy, linking in particular to adaptation, socio-ecological resilience, tipping points in global change, sustainable livelihoods and the bioresource economy.
Pipeline projects:
AdaptCost Project: SEI and UNEP are working together on the economics of adaptation in Africa. Ecosystem services are one element, and forced migration could emerge as a priority in the following phases.
Climate and Development Knowledge Network: SEI is leading a tender for the global hub/network proposed by DFID, with the University of Sussex as one of its major Knowledge Partners. SEI's Network design supports close liaison with existing networks, enhancing capacity in strategic ways. SEI suggests to propose CCEMA as a formal partner then particularly to co-sponsor development of the research plan, required in the first year.
Transformations in Risk and Humanitarian Crises Strategic Initiative: The roots of this initiative are in the understanding of the multiple stresses of dynamic vulnerability embedded in coupled socio-ecological systems. The nature of complexity - cross-scale interactions, impossibility of predicting futures, potential for flips in quasi-equilibrium states - demands an assessment of regions at-risk. The policy implications of the research concern governance of regions at risk - those complexes of environment-development interactions that are at or close to a tipping point of collapse. Our concern is to explore plausible futures where a complex of vulnerability tips into a humanitarian crisis. Conversely, we also intend to explore the potential for scaled up improvements in livelihoods, those plausible futures that achieve sustainability and a substantial reduction in vulnerability.
MRF Summer Academy: UNU, MRF and SEI continue to support the series of summer academies. The July 2008 Academy focused on forced migration while the 2009 Academy broadened the scope to climate change and tipping points in humanitarian crises. The 2010-2012 cycle of the MRF Chair and Summer Academies will have a main running theme of "Protecting Lives and Livelihoods in the Face of Environmental Change: Science to Policy" with changing emphasis each year from legal frameworks for human protection,to vulnerability assessments, to the role of local groups in adaptation in the face of potential forced displacement.