The Traditional Knowledge Associated to Biodiversity in an Age of Climate Change

Lun Yin

doi:10.11648/j.earth.20180705.12

Abstract

Climate change has largely influenced the biodiversity in the world, as the biodiversity hotspots areas are often also rich in cultural diversity, the local peoples have rich traditional knowledge associated to biodiversity, and these knowledge also provide alternative information about climate variability and climate change based on the experience and practices of biodiversity resource use. This review work examines the researches about traditional knowledge associated to biodiversity in monitoring and adapting to changing climatic conditions in different parts of the globe. We reviewed different reports from both International and Regional Organizations whereby we based our findings from the traditional knowledge and climate change, the traditional knowledge’s perception and lastly traditional knowledge’s adaption to climate change. In our findings we realized that traditional knowledge associated to biodiversity is not only effective toolbox, but also a process to adopt to the climate change at local level. Lastly this review also demonstrates how local people use their traditional knowledge about the climate to guide their biodiversity resource and its management. The disasters arising from negative impacts of climate change has brought many risks and threats to the indigenous peoples. This paper highlights the importance of integrating the scientific models in conjunction with traditional knowledge system of indigenous peoples. Integrating this traditional knowledge can add a significance value to the development of sustainable climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies that are rich in local content. It was observed that the traditional knowledge and coping strategies can no longer be fully adapted to the intensity and frequency of the present climate change due to unlimited resources and also lack the enough support from both local and international communities’ responsible for the climate policies.

Highlights

Climate change has been and is having a negative impact on the environment and livelihood of the people in any society, it has become a hot issue in the world today
Indigenous peoples are familiar and inexperienced to climate change: they are familiar with climate change because they live in complex and changeable climatic conditions for generations, forming rich and diverse traditional knowledge; they are unfamiliar with climate change because the instability of climate change and the risk of extreme climate disasters are intensifying and improving over the past thirty years, and it made indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge of climate fail and change
This does not reduce the value of traditional knowledge, because traditional knowledge is a knowledge based on climate change phenomena formed by local people, and a process of understanding and forming such knowledge

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has been and is having a negative impact on the environment and livelihood of the people in any society, it has become a hot issue in the world today. The impact of climate change is a very realistic problem for indigenous peoples, as pointed out in the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights: “The latest evidence shows that the livelihoods and cultures of 370 million indigenous peoples living in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania have faced the threat of climate change” [5]. For indigenous peoples, such as the marginalization of politics and economy, the invasion of land and resources, the violation of human rights, the discrimination, the abuse of resources and the loss of livelihoods, the impact of climate change has undoubtedly deepened the crisis and made them more vulnerable to the challenges [6]

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