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The SEI Tallinn centre

SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) is a research-based think tank with the aim of bridging environmental research and policy. SEI is a global network made up of eight centers around the globe and headquartered in Sweden. The SEI Tallinn centre was founded in 1992 and works with multi-level stakeholders on a broad range of sustainability issues including climate and disaster risk reduction (DRR). While some of theprojects are global in nature, much of the work is focused on the Baltic Sea Region.

SEI Tallinn has been exploring governance and decision-making processes and how they, often inadvertently, create negative consequences for the environment or become obstacles to intended climate adaptation or disaster risk reduction goals. Climate adaption and disaster risk management are complex processes that involve many actors. This makes them quite messy. They interact with multiple other policies and goals and require cross-sectoral planning at multiple decision-making levels. In some phases of disaster risk management, like the post-disaster response and recovery phase, there is pressure to make key decisions during a tight time period in order provide relief. Some of these decisions have. long-term consequences. The SEI Tallinn centre is interested in exploring how these decision-making processes can be supported for long-term sustainable and equitably resilient outcomes.

Meet Heidi Tuhkanen and Evelin Piirsalu, Senior Experts at SEI Tallinn

At SEI Tallinn, Heidi Tuhkanen and Evelin Piirsalu work in the Environmental Management programme, covering a large number of projects and environmental issues such as disaster risk reduction, green finance, urban eco tourism reducing food waste or reducing marine plastics, to name a few.

“In CASCADE, we have compiled a report which describes the climate risk drivers, hazards, and consequences in the Baltic Sea Region. This includes new and emerging cascading risks such as Natural Hazard Triggering Technological Disasters (Natech) and transboundary risks. We have also been conducting workshops with local level stakeholders to assess the obstacles to climate adaptation actions and interviewing national level actors about the implementation of climate adaptation policies and the current state of collaboration between climate adaptation actors and DRR actors. We are in the processes of assessing our results and providing them as input to the national level consultations that we are planning in the project over the next 6 months.

When thinking about the obstacles and challenges regarding climate change related disaster risk reduction and response at the moment in the Baltic Sea Region, we can say that according to our work with local and national level actors, the availability of local level data and resources, including financial resources pose challenges and limit climate adaptation at the local level. Limited resources also affects the level of cooperation between different sectors and thus mainstreaming of adaptation issues into all the necessary sectors.  

Our hope in the framework of the CASCADE project is that we will be able to identify clear and concrete recommendations for how to promote collaboration specifically between the climate adaptation and DRR decision making processes, but also to support the mainstreaming of both of these processes into other sectoral decision making processes. This will be carried out in order to create synergies between policy actions across different sectors so that we can maximise the limited resources and time we have available”.

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Text by: Heidi Tuhkanen

Photos: Heidi Tuhkanen and Evelin Piirsalu from the SEI Tallinn office / Heidi Tuhkanen collection and Kristiina Martin; Heidi Tuhkanen in CASCADE workshop in Poland / SWFES Petri Nenonen; Evelin Piirsalu at the SEI Tallinn office / Kristiina Martin

This is an article of the series “Introducing CASCADE Project Partners”. During the next weeks and months CASCADE introduces all the Project Partners and their visions here on the CASCADE website.