Local Knowledge for Climate Change Adaption

Session Organizer & Chair: Kimberlee Chambers

Friday, May 17

The IPCC Working Group II Report (2007) stated that, those who will be the most effected by climate change have the least ability to adapt to changing conditions. It is the traditional and indigenous populations of the world who live closely connected to their local landscapes that are both more likely to feel the impacts of climate change and the least likely to be able to mitigate them. Despite the fact that traditional and indigenous peoples are likely to feel the impacts of climate change first, scientific models and predictions have done little to help them prepare. Indigenous and traditional communities have rich histories of ethnophenology – the cultural perception of the timing of recurrent natural history events – that have been recorded orally, ethnographically, and still used today. This ethnophenological knowledge, which is both place and time specific, has the potential to be applied to a more detailed understanding of the impacts of climate change and local community management strategies for cultural survival. Indigenous communities themselves have recognized the importance of their knowledge for scientific assessment of climate change and have encouraged it to be recognized as an equal tool in research. We invite scholars engaged in research that focuses on some aspect of local knowledge on climate to submit papers for a session(s) focusing on empirical and theoretical work.