Tiivistelmä. - Sammanfattning.

The book contains the proceedings of the OECD Conference that was held in Rome in December 1999. It presents the wide range of initiatives and indicators that are already in place, and outlines the challenges that remain in measuring progress towards sustainable development.

Climate change is expected to have a profound impact on natural resources, and thus on the primary industries (agriculture, forestry and fisheries) in the Nordic countries. Climate change induces risks but also creates possibilities for new production systems on land and in the ocean. Climatic changes also represent great challenges for policy-making and management regimes. The current knowledge base on natural resources in the Nordic region needs to be expanded to fully address the impacts of climate change. In particular it is important to address the need for improved policies and new policy instruments. The research programme Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation in Nordic Primary Industries is a coordinated set of thematic research networks with the objective to create a Nordic knowledge base on climate change interactions with primary industries in the Nordic region.

In the project we show that climate change is not only affecting a few individual species or habitats in the Nordic region, but that number of changes occur concurrently and at many scales.