European knowledge and entrepreneurial ecosystems: Networks within climate change and adaptation research

Research on a topic as intricate as climate change and adaptation can be seen as a complex ecosystem combining thousands of projects by a large set of actors. This article studies the EU Seventh Framework Program funded projects to understand how research has been funded and managed in Europe to develop a specific knowledge ecosystem around climate change and adaptation. The theoretical background offers an overview of the topics of climate change and knowledge ecosystems. The research projects database was used to construct and make sense of a complex ecosystem. A synthetic description of the technical work conducted and the results obtained are presented. The data is analyzed using social network analysis to provide evidence of structural characteristics of the networks, the relevance of different sub-domains in climate change and adaptation research, and the emergence of entrepreneurial ecosystems through knowledge.