After celebrating eleven events in the different islands that take part in the project. Balearic Island is the stage for the last one in this first approach with stakeholders.
The essential objective was to quantify the impact chains through the concept of risk, which involves the hazard, the exposure and the vulnerability.
The essential task of the local experts was to provide the necessary information to design the impact chains and give their opinion on how to formulate these chains.
The project also needs their opinion on possible adaptation and mitigation measures and how they can help in the dissemination towards society.
Among the main questions raised in the roundtable were why to delete the fisheries from the project. The reason is that its weight in Balearic economy is small, it has an undeniable cultural and environmental importance though.
On the other hand, In Balearic Islands, aquaculture is not seen as a strategic sector due to its competition with the tourism sector.
Regarding tourism, the experts explained the difficulties they have to show to the hotel managers that they are losing money due to Climate Change and are surprisingly no doing anything to solve that. This situation casts doubt about how they will take action for impacts that will happen in the medium term.
The members of UIB (partners of Soclimpact) stressed the need to do a SWOT analysis. They explained that the issue of Climate Change could be a lever for change in the economic model to overcome a model based on low-level services. They also commented that the problem is how to influence the sector (e.g. the difficulties found to reach the representatives of Mallorca Hotel Federation). Still, despite this, it is crucial to modify the present functioning of the system, so the economic structure assumes the cost of adaptation required to face the CC.
Gabriel Jordá led the roundtable on impact chains. He showed examples of impact chains in aquaculture and tourism. He also mentioned that it would be interesting to have annual satisfaction surveys to be able to correlate it with parameters such as temperature, storms, the abundance of jellyfish, etc.)
The session ended with a better understanding of the importance to take action against Climate Change since its effect are already noticed and how this type of events are crucial to create synergies and bring together the main actors that could smooth the work of SOCLIMPACT project