Indigenous knowledge of a changing climate

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of humans’ growing disconnect with the natural world, although not all societies share the same burden of responsibility for its creation. Compared to the dominant industrialised societies whose activities in the last 200 years or so have caused most of the climate impacts currently observed, Indigenous people living on their traditional lands bear little responsibility for current and future projected consequences of a changing climate. Despite this, they are likely to suffer the most from direct and indirect climate change due to their close connection to the natural world and their reduced social–ecological resilience—consequence of centuries of oppressive policies imposed on them by dominant non-Indigenous societies. Much of the world’s remaining diversity—biological, ecosystem, landscape, cultural and linguistic—resides in Indigenous territories. The main knowledge-holders of the site-specific holistic knowledge about various aspects of this diversity, Indigenous peoples, play a significant role in maintaining locally resilient social–ecological systems. Despite the recent adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, Indigenous people continue to be denied their rights and are subjected to climate injustice, remaining largely excluded from the official UN climate negotiations. In a recent statement, World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick acknowledged that Indigenous people carry a ‘disproportionate share of the burden of climate change effects’ and must be included in international climate change discussions. Translating this largely theoretical recognition into practice remains a major challenge, in large part because of the perceived inferiority of local Indigenous knowledge compared to the conventional western scientific mode of inquiry. While