Traditional communities, territories and climate change in the literature – case studies and the role of law

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditional communities are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, especially given the connection with nature and its territory. Despite this, traditional knowledge has been recognized as relevant to a better design of climate policies. This paper evaluates how the literature is studying the importance of law to protect traditional communities and respective territories and integrate their knowledge in climate change adaptation mechanisms. For this purpose, it undertakes a literature review of scientific articles that cross the topics of indigenous/traditional communities, climate change, territory, water, and law, published between 2010 and 2020. The findings show a residual number of articles on climate change paying attention to traditional communities and an uneven distribution of case studies among the world’ regions. Furthermore, they bring to the fore that, despite the potential to foster the protection of traditional communities from climate change impacts and to assure the integration of their knowledge into resilience policymaking, the role of law is scantly referred to in articles and the Paris Agreement has not exerted significant influence in the development of new studies with this approach. Given the relevance of this subject and the identified gap, this article suggests new paths for research development.