ABSTRACT
In the midst of various environmental, economic and social crises, a great need exists for estimating future changes and designing policy for sustainable development. Large-scale sustainability problems, such as climate change, are complex in at least two levels. First, ‘ontological complexity’ (see Emmeche 2004) refers to the way climate change, for example, results from a complex set of interactions within a socio-ecological system, composed of subsystems and internal variables and connected to various other socio-ecological systems (see Ostrom 2009). Climate change research is complicated even if, in practice, it cannot encompass the dynamics of the whole socio-ecological system but operates from a particular frame of reference and usually on a smaller scale in terms of time, location, or theme. In the search for solutions, interdisciplinarity is called for. No single framework of knowledge could address the complex dynamics of climate change, including the ecological, economic, social, cultural and technological processes in which it is embedded.
