May
10
Climate Change, Water, and Indigenous Peoples: Forgotten No More
May 10, 2009 | Posted by Michael "Aquadoc" Campana
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I’ve posted about climate change and its impacts on water resources, but have not really thought much about the impacts on indigenous communities. Yet these communities will likely suffer the consequences of something they had virtually no role in creating. They’ll just be dragged down with and by the rest of us. No say in the matter, right?
A few weeks I Twittered a CNN story on climate change effects – flooding, melting permafrost – that prompted the Eskimo village of Newtok, AK, to vote to abandon the coastal site for a safer one nine miles up the Ninglick River. Newtok’s 340 residents will be much safer there.
I had forgottten about that story until the recent AWRA Conference when Larry Hartig discussed the plight of Newtok and some 30 villages, many of them native villages, along Alaska’s coast.
But what really piqued my interest was a fascinating presentation at the same conference by Sarah Trainor of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP) at the University of Alaska. Her talk was titled Climate Change, Water Impacts and Indigenous Peoples: Engaging Native Knowledge in Cross-Regional Comparison Between Alaska, the Pacific Islands and the American Southwest.
I thought the choice of the three regions was appropriate: all three are on the front lines of climate change and water impacts.
Here is a copy of her abstract:
Trainor discussed the video conferencing and the information gleaned. There were some common themes among the three communities:
- Take personal responsibility
- Take action
- Exert leadership
- Realize importance of cross-regional communication
- Form partnerships between Western science and native knowledge
- Recognize importance of native knowledge
The native knowledge aspect is interesting. I used to disparage that until the 1993 hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico. One of the Anglo medical investigators noted that a Navajo elder had remarked that he knew this was going to be a problem because the harvest of pinyon nuts had been very abundant.
Say what?
Well, the virus was spread by rodents, who of course loved pinyon nuts. More pinyon nuts, more rodents. More rodents, more opportunities for human-rodent interaction. Presto! More hantavirus! Duhhh….
You can find more information on the Cross-Regional Dialogue: Climate Change, Water Impacts and Indigenous People. You can access a program flyer. ACCAP, CLIMAS (Climate Assessment for the Southwest) and Pacific RISA are partners, The project is funded byNOAA’s RISA (Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment) program.
In a related vein, Anchorage was the site of the recent Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, 20-24 April 2009. The consensus declaration closes thusly:
We offer to share with humanity our Traditional Knowledge, innovations, and practices relevant to climate change, provided our fundamental rights as intergenerational guardians of this knowledge are fully recognized and respected. We reiterate the urgent need for collective action
Here is the complete final declaration:
Download Final_Anchorage_Declaration
It’s worth reading.
There is more information on climate change and indigenous peoples from TEBTEBBA.
My Take: We have a lot to learn, and it’s not all in books and journal articles.
“We don’t have a lot of time. We have to all listen to one another.” – David Choquehuanca, foreign minister of Bolivia, at the Anchorage Summit
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