Fire and Water: Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Climate Challenges in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed as ‘traditional and outdated’, and hence irrelevant to modern ecological assessment. This theoretical paper critically examines the arguments advanced to elevate modern western ecological knowledge over indigenous ecological knowledge, as well as the sources and uses of indigenous ecological knowledge. The central argument of the paper is that although the two systems are conceptually different, it would be fallacious to regard one as superior to the other merely because they are premised on different worldviews. Key words: Worldview, indigenous ecological Knowledge, western ecological knowledge, African Philosophy Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK) New Series, Vol.3 No.2, December 2011, pp.35-47

The nineteenth century mass mammal extinctions in the semi-arid zone of the Murray-Darling basin, southeastern Australia, are examined in the context of prior traditional land management. A model of grassland dynamics reveals a multi-trophic level productive pulse one to five years post-fire, followed by senescence and increasing flammability. Traditional Owner patch burning of grassland optimized human and mammalian food (including tubers, seeds and fungi) and decreased fire risk. Over at least 40 000 years, the persistence and abundance of fauna responded to this energetically closed self-reinforcing management. In 1830, depopulation (disease, massacres and displacement) effectively ended traditional management, an ecologically traumatic event that extinguished these productivity pulses. Associated mammal populations of c. 20 species collapsed, and all eco-engineering and mycophagous species, such as bilbies, bettongs and bandicoots, rapidly disappeared. Traditional land management increased productivity, habitat heterogeneity and reduced wildfire risk, underpinning mammal abundance. This has remained unrecognized by most mammalogists and land managers. Blaming extinctions predominantly on the additions by Europeans (introduction of ungulates, feral grazers and predators etc.), disastrous as they were, fails to acknowledge the initial cause of rarity, i.e. loss of productivity, habitat and niches when traditional management was subtracted from country. As ecosystems continue to degrade, understanding the primary cause is fundamental to improved management. Although too late for extinct species, respect for, and inclusion of, traditional land management knowledge provides a direction for future land management.

There is ample evidence in literature that indigenous knowledge, practices and beliefs often contribute to conservation and in some cases enhance local biodiversity. As a result there has been renewed interest in the use of indigenous knowledge, especially in forest management and conservation. Despite the renewed interest, incorporation of indigenous ecological knowledge in natural resource planning and management remains elusive. Using focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews, the study gives an account of the beliefs, practices and norms that have been used for conservation by the adjacent community of Kakamega Forest over the years. The study also highlights the implications of successive forest management regimes on the use of resources and indigenous ecological knowledge. Results indicate that the local community applied various beliefs, practices and norms to regulate use of Kakamega Forest. However, the advent of forest management regimes has brought resource use restrictions which often neglect indigenous ecological knowledge. This study provides key intervention strategies important for enhancing the complementary functions of indigenous ecological knowledge and forest management objectives.

Globally, and particularly in Argentina, biodiversity is declining due to the loss of species and habitats, while indigenous cultures are being eroded simultaneously. This results in a reduced capacity to transmit indigenous cultural diversity, the EIK (Ecological Indigenous Knowledge), and biological and cultural resources for future generations. The traditional use of the land by indigenous peoples for thousands of years has contributed to maintain biodiversity and cultural values. The use of EIK can generate new strategies for R + D (Research and Development) for biodiversity conservation and for the implementation of natural resources management (NRM) systems promoting the integration of indigenous communities in decision-making processes. This chapter reports results of an analysis on integration of EIK and ESK (Ecological Scientific Knowledge) in NRM in Misiones Province (Argentina). We describe the results and recommendations generated by analyzing national and international experiences in NRM, including agroforestry; and present a case study in the indigenous communities that inhabit the Guarani Reserve for Multiple Use (GRMU) of the School of Forestry-National University of Misiones, regarding NRM activities and related cultural values. From the results of surveys conducted with indigenous communities it appears that the place where the EIK can regenerate lies in the natural context where the EIK has originated. There is a need to take preventive measures to remediate the erosive processes that undermine the integrity of the cultural setting where the EIK could be applied. Preventive measures include the legal possession of large areas of forest in order to stop or slow the advance of the agricultural frontier on natural spaces where the EIK is recreated.

Land degradation is the major economic and environmental threat in Ethiopia. Since the 1960s, the various traditional land management systems have undergone unprecedented changes. Within the context of farmers' awareness of land degradation and local responses to the problems, the objective of this study is to examine the resilience and stability of traditional land management knowledge in Southern Ethiopia. Data were collected using interviews, group discussions and field observations. Results of the study demonstrate that farmers have a wealth of experience in identifying the severity, dynamics and causes of soil erosion and soil fertility decline and grazing land deterioration. In response to these problems, farmers have developed a wide range of traditional land management practices, supported across the generations by the traditional law (benee woga) and norms. However, recent changes include reduction and abandonment of fallowing, modification of crop rotation and large‐scale reduction of manuring. The current practices used to fulfil livelihood requirements are the main driving forces that affect the resilience of the system. Thus, environmental and land use management planning should consider rehabilitating land not only based on traditional land management knowledge but also with regards to raising its agricultural productivity. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In a climate change context, indigenous and local knowledge includes the use of traditional practices, crop varieties, and land management techniques that have evolved in response to local climatic conditions. This inter-generational transfer of knowledge is crucial for maintaining and adapting these practices to meet the challenges posed by climate change. Despite the many advantages of using indigenous knowledge in climate change adaptation in Africa, its implementation faces several obstacles. Understanding these obstacles is crucial for integrating indigenous knowledge with scientific approaches to enhance climate resilience effectively. This paper offers an analysis of some of the most critical obstacles that hinder the use of indigenous and local knowledge in climate change adaptation in African countries.

The Amazon rainforests and their biological diversity are being lost rapidly by the onslaught of extractive industries, large-scale agriculture and infrastructure development, which also undermines the integrity of indigenous territories and ethnicities, threatening the tremendous cultural diversity of the Amazon. The loss of forest, the disintegration of local communities and the increase of the market economy erode indigenous ecological knowledges that is intricately tied to the territory and the forest itself, with all that is contained within it. This chapter draws on collaborative research with an indigenous knowledge holder in the Colombian Amazon and presents insights into the wealth of indigenous ecological knowledges that still exist and that is of tremendous importance for understanding the different ways of seeing and relating to the social-ecological systems still present in the Amazon region. Based on these insights, we argue for more inclusive approaches to forest governance, that includes indigenous ecological knowledges, particularly relating to forest fauna. In more particular, indigenous knowledges on hunting must be included in future forest governance in order to ensure the continuous existence and practice of the wealth of this knowledge that has been accumulated by indigenous peoples over many generations. (Less)

Karim-Aly S. Kassam: Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic

Extreme climate change causes an immeasurable threat to the livelihood security and prosperity of rural communities, including the natural environment and resources managed by the local people in the Kgalagadi District of Botswana. The study aims to understand the indigenous ecological knowledge of local communities about climate change, its impacts on the environment, and their livelihoods across five villages in the Kgalagadi District of Botswana. The present study used a semi-structured questionnaire survey at the household level who were randomly selected using the village register book. The results indicated that all the respondents in Kang village and some from Lehututu and Tshane villages perceived that the causes of climate change were unknown. However, some respondents across the other four villages believed that climate change is caused by various factors including wildfires, pollution from industries, impacts from livestock, and vehicles, as well as a curse from God. Indigenous knowledge must be well incorporated with scientific methods and up-to-date climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies to envisage more concrete results. This helps to integrate the insight of local people into policies and strategies to make an effort for solutions that are crucial for sustainable development. We suggest that all stakeholders should harmonise the use of indigenous knowledge with climate change strategies, to make the best use of its contribution to the successful execution of climate change policies.

Extreme climate change causes an immeasurable threat to the livelihood security and prosperity of rural communities, including the natural environment and resources managed by the local people in the Kgalagadi District of Botswana. The study aims to understand the indigenous ecological knowledge of local communities about climate change, its impacts on the environment, and their livelihoods across five villages in the Kgalagadi District of Botswana. The present study used a semi-structured questionnaire survey at the household level who were randomly selected using the village register book. The results indicated that all the respondents in Kang village and some from Lehututu and Tshane villages perceived that the causes of climate change were unknown. However, some respondents across the other four villages believed that climate change is caused by various factors including wildfires, pollution from industries, impacts from livestock, and vehicles, as well as a curse from God. Indigenous knowledge must be well incorporated with scientific methods and up-to-date climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies to envisage more concrete results. This helps to integrate the insight of local people into policies and strategies to make an effort for solutions that are crucial for sustainable development. We suggest that all stakeholders should harmonise the use of indigenous knowledge with climate change strategies, to make the best use of its contribution to the successful execution of climate change policies.

*Background/Question/Methods* In our increasingly urban world, indigenous knowledge of local ecology is declining rapidly, because survival in industrialized urban environments does not depend on knowing the details of local flora, fauna, or phenologies. While traditional ecological knowledge has been documented since 1980s, this is has been largely descriptive, e.g., ethnobotany of sacred groves, cultivation practices, or use of medicinal plants. Until recently, conservation biologists and managers of protected areas have followed western models of conservation that exclude local people and often abandon local ecological knowledge. However, many scientific studies of local ecosystems would not have been possible without the knowledge-base of indigenous people helping researchers. Yet, careful scientific analysis of such knowledge systems is scarce, except in some commercial applications such as forestry or fisheries. Further, even in rare instances when park managers have recruited knowledgeable locals as partners in PA management, the bureaucracy ended up dissipating ecological knowledge rather than sustaining it. The challenge therefore is to understand the epistemology of ecological knowledge, especially the costs and benefits to local people, to help create novel management regimes which provide new incentives for sustaining such knowledge even as traditional dependencies on natural resources are transformed for long-term sustainability of biodiversity. *Results/Conclusions* This paper reviews the literature on indigenous ecological knowledge in South Asia, to establish a baseline for systematic epistemological analyses. Examples include the Bihari bird-trappers assisting the Bombay Natural History Society's bird-ringing projects, Irulas helping snake research at Madras Crocodile Bank, Kanis supporting a variety of research projects, including our own, in Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve over the past two decades, and the modern day settlers in Andaman Islands who have turned from over-harvesting and poaching to sustainable cultivation of Edible-nest Swiftlets. We argue that indigenous knowledge is useful not only for monitoring ecosystems or determining use of natural resources, but more importantly for generating fundamental scientific insights, and adding to the knowledge part of our collective social capital. Even as indigenous knowledge is being lost, volunteer-based Citizen Science projects are recruiting amateur naturalists, especially in urban areas, to monitor and study local biodiversity. Such approaches need to be extended into genuinely participatory research programs where indigenous people are engaged in generating and sustaining ecological knowledge, from traditional and modern scientific perspectives, to become well-informed stewards of the socio-ecological systems we inhabit from local to global scales. This is a crucial step towards slowing the loss of biodiversity by reversing our collective loss of knowledge of biodiversity.

With the inception of global climate change and its related risks, impacts, and challenges many rural and indigenous communities across the globe are today facing tremendous cultural, economic, and environmental change which is likely going to weaken their adaptability and resilience capacities to climate change. Indigenous and local people have for centuries been known to possess the capacity to adapt to environmental change within their ecological environment. However, in the face of profound and continuous global environmental change, some scholars have argued and projected that cultural, biological diversity, as well as local resilience capacities to environmental change, will likely be severely impacted leading to the ultimate loss of these valuable sources of livelihood and survival of the many remote, rural, and local communities across the world. Despite this popular notion that local and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK) systems will disappear, the academic vision of local and IEK has progressively shifted from being viewed as a static body of knowledge to one of dynamism. Today, this knowledge is being hybridized through the accommodation of new forms of information or its exposition to external socio-economic drivers. Therefore, its relevance and the role it plays in disaster risk management, natural resource conservation, and management, and now in climate change adaptation must be clearly understood, acknowledged, and given the utmost attention, it deserves if we are to fully address the impacts emanating from a warming climate. In understanding the role and relevance of local and IEK systems in climate change adaptation and disaster risk management this paper analyzes present climate change-related impacts on agriculture in Barisal Southern Bangladesh and identifies effective local and indigenous ecological knowledge adaptation mechanisms being utilized by the local people in this region for climate change adaptation, resilience building, and sustainability. Through literature reviews, fieldwork research, interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) the findings of this research indicate that local and indigenous adaptation strategies to climate change impacts are striving and are enhancing the adaptability and resilience capacities of the many poor local people in this region. This research, therefore, recommends that the usefulness and relevance of local and IEK must be acknowledged and incorporated into the mainstream developmental and climate change policies, particularly at the local and community level where resources are scarce, and the adaptability capacity, is weak.

Indigenous knowledge (IK) and its various definitions—Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK), Traditional Knowledge (TK), Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK), Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK)—is a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, experience, and beliefs, evolving through adaptive processes and culturally transmitted through generations. It is about the relationship that living beings maintain with one another and with all living things in their environment. In rural Morocco as other parts of the world, IK has allowed rural communities to sustain livelihoods, buffer for extreme climatic conditions, maintain resource availability and food security. For all its virtues, IK is increasingly recognized for its contribution to sustainable resource management, sustainable agriculture, climate change adaptation, and food security. It has not, however, been recognized for the promotion of women’s social enterprise. As the central authorities in Morocco struggle to integrate rural women into development initiatives, it has failed to take into account women’s traditional knowledge. This is coupled with the stigmatized image that many rural illiterate women are “backwards,” reinforced by the perception that women who have left the countryside to live in urban areas are more successful. This book chapter is about the need to acknowledge and record women’s Indigenous/traditional knowledge practices and skills as a powerful educational tool to reconcile and lift rural women out of poverty through social enterprise.

Local-scale human–environment relationships are fundamental to energy sovereignty, and in many contexts, Indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) is integral to such relationships. For example, Tribal leaders in southwestern USA identify firewood harvested from local woodlands as vital. For Diné people, firewood is central to cultural and physical survival and offers a reliable fuel for energy embedded in local ecological systems. However, there are two acute problems: first, climate change-induced drought will diminish local sources of firewood; second, policies aimed at reducing reliance on greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources may limit alternatives like coal for home use, thereby increasing firewood demand to unsustainable levels. We develop an agent-based model trained with ecological and community-generated ethnographic data to assess the future of firewood availability under varying climate, demand and IEK scenarios. We find that the long-term sustainability of Indigenous firewood harvesting is maximized under low-emissions and low-to-moderate demand scenarios when harvesters adhere to IEK guidance. Results show how Indigenous ecological practices and resulting ecological legacies maintain resilient socio-environmental systems. Insights offered focus on creating energy equity for Indigenous people and broad lessons about how Indigenous knowledge is integral for adapting to climate change.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.

Sustainable development, recommended by the Brundtland Commission, is accepted as the guiding principle on environment and development issues, by the international community. The report also drew attention of the international community to the crucial prospective contribution by indigenous ecological knowledge towards resolving global environmental issues and preventing further deterioration of environment and natural resources. Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge has been receiving validity in decision-making today. Indigenous communities generally construct policies that allow successful resource management. They respected nature’s carrying capacity and threshold limits and had management approaches for ecological resilience and regeneration. Intimate association of indigenous communities with nature and their dependency on natural resources are the key secrets behind indigenous ecological knowledge. Indigenous ecological knowledge can provide valuable ecological and biological insights into sustainable use of resources and their regeneration. Vast potential of indigenous ecological knowledge, for its meaningful use in finding solutions to cope with global environmental change, remains yet untapped. The introductory chapter discusses various aspects of indigenous ecological knowledge, its integration with modern scientific knowledge and its role in coping with the global environmental change.