BALANCE: an attempt to assess climate change impacts in the Barents Sea Region M. A. Lange & H. Roderfeld & R. Leemans Received: 13 November 2007 / Accepted: 13 November 2007 / Published online: 22 December 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 1 Introduction The term climate change (and also the broader term global change that includes climate change) has today almost become a common household term. Most people can relate one way or the other to varying climate conditions and what they may mean to them. However, it is usually not before some “bad weather” hits a region that people start to realize that climate, climate variability and climate change may have very concrete consequences for their daily life. No later than at this point, questions are raised about the more concrete causes and consequences of climate change. And these questions are equally asked and discussed by politicians, the business community and the public at large. It is these questions that have driven climate science for the last few decades. While the initial emphasis has been on the “global picture,” there has been an increasing urge to narrow the focus down to regional or even sub-regional investigations and assessments. Even more so as we began to realize just how different the manifestations of climate changes and their impacts are, depending on the particular region one looks at. Another important observation has been that “climate science” needs to include more than the physical sciences it started from. This recognition stems from the realization that the climate system goes far beyond the physical world and include societal processes that change, for example, the atmosphere’ s composition and land surface. Moreover, when it comes to addressing the consequences of climate change and possible mitigation and adaptation, disciplines such as economics or sociology have to be consulted to come up with results that are more than “academic.” Climatic Change (2008) 87:1–6 DOI 10.1007/s10584-007-9368-7 M. A. Lange : H. Roderfeld (*) Institute for Geophysics, University of Münster, Corrensstr. 24, 48149 Münster, Germany e-mail: roderfe@uni-muenster.de R. Leemans Environmental Systems Analysis Group, Wageningen University, PO Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, Netherlands