How are community-based climate change adaptation strategies mediated by culture and local knowledge?

Patrick, I am also very interested in this topic. For now, I suggest you the publications of Prof. Miguel Altieri at the Univ. of California at Berkeley (including those at http://www.agroeco.org).

In agriculture (with the possible exception of large scale irrigation systems) all adaptation is local and usually requires both local knowledge as well as scientific information concerning consequences of climate change.

As a brief answer to your question, LK/culture constitutes the interpretive and institutional frames through which the problems of environmental change (inc. CC) will be perceived, valued, interpreted and acted upon (see Roncoli, Crane and Orlove 2010: Fielding climate change in cultural anthropology).

How (LK-led) autonomous adaptation articulates - or doesn't - with (inter)national policies and (inter)national research agendas is a very timely topic. In many CC circles, there is a lot of talk about bringing policy into practice. However, if we are to get past a sort of rehashed high-modernist approach of expert centralized adaptation planning, work like yours, focusing on bringing practice into policy, will be tremendously important in the coming years. This is especially true in agriculture and other NRM fields.

I have a couple of articles directly discussing your very question (see my RG page for "Adaptation as Performance" and "Of Models and Meanings"). Along with many co-authors, Carla Roncoli and Ben Orlove have also written about this topic extensively in various contexts.

Good luck with your research!

Todd

I think culture and IK can both benefit for sustainable development and our nature , It can pass on the experience and lessons in generations by community culture and rule ,but the time scale of climate change by reason of CO2 concentration ascending far exceeds human history. It is the challenge that local community has never coped with.so I am not too optimistic about the adapting experience from local community culture and IK, The good news is that climate change science research supports the motivation of ecology civilization transition through social culture ,politics ,economy etc. to adapt climate change. Benefit of information development and global village ,people can pool the wisdom and efforts of everyone to cope with the challenge of climate change .

You definately have to take into account local culture and indigenous knowledge when organizing strategies for climate change adaptation. This is crucial. Local stakeholders must be involved in the process, first to determine what are the local conditions and to carry out the necessary studies to understand how climate changes are impacting the region. Yiu need to understand current practices and determine to what extent these may need to be modified/improved in order to adapt. Sometimes local proactices which were better suited for a speific region have been replaced by "imported" and/or commercial practices which are ill-suited or not as approrpiate to previous indigenous practices and hence a research on those previous local ways of doing things needs to be carried out. In a second stage when you define potential strategies local participation is again important through their understanding of the region and in the enecessary training that the adaptation may require. Last but no least adaptation is not a once and for all process but rather a continuous one and the contributions from stakeholders is again crucial. This is clearly an interdisciplinary task including natural sciences, social sciences and engineering/technology.

Patrick, I am conducting Research in the Helmholtz Regional Climate Initiative (REKLIM). Topic 10 considers Adapation and Climate Risks in regional and local cultural settings. Two Papers in the making are empirical studies on: regional-cultural "prevention mentalities" and migrant populations Climate Risk perceptions in Germany. Finished paper: "Risk perception and religion" (See contributions). If findings are pertinent to your Research please follow, further discuss concepts.

Yes, local adaptive strategies to (with) climate change have been happening for immemorial times, and IK have coped with climate variability for such long periods. Moreover, I believe that the process of climate change is not recent, it has been occurring over centuries while some indigenous cultures have repetitively built resilient systems (i.e. Agroforestry) to control or keep the damage at a minimum. Adaptation to climate change will tremendously rely on community-based initiatives (bottom-up endeavors).

I will highly recommend that you consult Dr. Miguel Altieri (a notorious Agroecologist) writings.

I am also working on a similar research in Africa.

Good luck

I have not worked in this field for many years now, but when I was involved (early 1980s) it had become clear that to attempt to introduce adaptive changes that were not compatible with IK, local culture, etc. was to commit to a waste of time and resources. And, that it is more effective to attract than it is to push. If there is a difference between that time and this, it would seem to be that in those cases the primary motivation was local "economic improvement", whereas as CC effects become more apparent needed adaptive changes will be much more pressing than mere "economic improvements". Human adaptiveness may well be tested, and we may fail, if the rate of human cultural adaptation is slower than the rate of functional changes needed due to CC. I am not at all sure that the rate of human cultural adaptation can be shortened beyond a certain but unknown (to me anyway) limit. Good luck in your efforts.

Bryce - thanks for your comments. I think that we cannot underestimate the capacity of human cultural adaptation in the face of CC. However, I think that it is apparent from history that human society does not effectively use foresight to tackle issues that will emerge in the future (partly because we have an attitude that "everything will work out fine", and partly due to people acting 'here and now' in their immediate self-interest, rather than for long-term intergenerational well-being). However, when socio-ecological systems are put under stress they have the capacity to undergo rapid transformation culture change. I believe that Ostrom et al. from the Stockholm Environment Institute have written on this subject (in the socio-ecological system literature). I believe that we will see some unprecedented cultural adaptations in the face of rapid global environmental change. However, the immediate challenge for our research community is to develop anticipatory solutions and create an enabling environment so that society can mitigate losses due to CC, and exploit emerging beneficial opportunities.

Patrick, maintaining an optimistic outlook is sometimes necessary just to continue at one's work, but it can also bias one's ability to observe and interpret observations objectively. Your endeavor is in an area in which I have no formal involvement, but it is my impression is (and its potential to bias should not be overlooked) that we have a natural human desire to take an optimistic view when much of human history seems laden with, how shall I say it, depressing approaches to addressing individual or collective (tribal, regional, national,...) stresses. Just an immediate reaction to your response.

There is a principle called hedonistic adaptation as well. A loose definition of this concept is that people can view any situation no matter how bad as normal is they grow up with it and figure out how to live pretty normal and happy lives in spite of their objective situation. People who have lived in the poorest places in the world have seen that. However this also suggests that many cultural adaptations are simply making the best of a bad situation rather than to get to the cause of the bad situation.

Jere, hedonistic adaptation sounds like a reasonable descriptive principle to me. I recall a happiness survey by some psychologists a few years back that found happiness did not have much to do with material standard of living, but more to do with whether or not one was emotionally adapted to one's life situation. I have had occasion to see some folks living in what I perceived to be pretty dire circumstances that seemed as happy or even happier than some of my "better off" economic peers. I think your last sentence gets at a no less important point that seems to require some nuancing with respect to climate change adaptation/response, which would be helped with another principle that I have heard referred to as environmental baseline drift. That drift is related to our individual memories being functionally relatively short, so that if our environment changes relatively slowly, and we constantly make minor adjustments that accommodate us to those changes, we perceive there has not been any change at all (same as the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pan of heating water, I suppose). Now what I am wondering about is whether climate change impacts will be gradual enough that they are functionally just baseline drift for individuals. If so, that would not seem to bode well for anything other than "business as usual" measures with respect to climate change, which I would seem likely to incline humanity toward repetition of past assignments of blame and resultant, usually brutal, misdirected and ineffective, courses of action.

Dear Patrick, it is an interesting question to what extent adaptation differs locally on the basis of local preferences. We did research on the Dutch situation and are now involved in a comparison between the Netherlands and the UK.

You might be interested in the article in Ecology & Society on the meaning of resilience (Keessen et 2013)

You might wish to check the current project on Overheating, directed by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. It is a multi-country project, i believe that Eriksen himself is doing research in Australia.

Patrick, I would recommend that you take a look at some of the excellent articles coming out of the Arctic; Robin Bronen "Climate Induced Displacement of Alaka Native communities" she also does work in the South Pacific on this topic, Elizabeth Marino "Climate Change and the Inequity of climate Intervetion" in Global Environmental Change," Peter Schweitzer, Mark Nuttall, Philippe Amistislavski, Fikret Berkes and Dyanna Jolly "Adapting to Climate Change: Social-Ecological Resilience in a Canadian Western Arctic Community," Harley Johansen "Adaptation Priorities on Russia's Kola Peninsula; Climate change vs post Soviet transition" in Polar Geography, Grete Hovelsrud "Arctic Societies, Cultures and Peopls in a changing cryosphere" in AMBIO. you can Google any of these names with the word Arctic or Climate Change and find references to their work. Take look at the Arctic Human Development Report (version #1 from 2009 on line now http://www.svs.is/AHDR/, the next iteration out this spring). There is also a nice set University of the Arctic on-line materials on this issue.

I know you are thinking, "What does Bangladesh have to do with the Arctic," but as group of people that will be needing to adapt sooner rather than later there is much to be learned from Arctic communities, and the literature about them, that will be very relevant to your interest. Researchers in the Arctic have been investigating the exact question you are interested in for the last decade, so their thinking is ahead of the curve on this in many ways.

If you are doing a dissertation project, you should investigate the Arctic Social Sciences Program at the NSF or the Cultural Anthropology Program for funding.

Dear Patrick, Adaptation to climate change may vary from one culture to another. This depends on the degree of reliance on natural resources by local people.And particularly for those engaged in agricultural sector, their growing season and managing farm are directed affected by climate change. At this point, local knowledge, wisdom and local technology will play role.

Dear Patrick, I am also doing a research work on the impact of technological adaptation on the cultural life of the tribes of the Lake Chad basin in Sub-Saharan Africa. My goal is to raise the question of the non-sustanability of the adaptation to climate change that ignores or destroys the local culture and indegenous knowlegde. I am still at the proposal stage, trying to articulate what I want to do and to establish a methodology. The contributions to your topic have broadened my horizon. I found the attached article useful. See for yourself.

This is an interesting question, especially from a control automation perspective where indigenous knowledge systems and cultural background is starting to play an essential role is breaking barriers to technology entry.

Our research in transactive energy system control in community shared energy systems with customer engagement in active digital demand response for 100% renewable energy smart microgrid operations incorporates the Ubuntu African traditions and ways of thinking in smart microgrid and smartgrid control

This acts as an enabler in local technology acceptance and improves customer satisfaction in humanitarian energy projects.