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Land use and adaptation- How does the assigned UNFCCC theme relate to your country? (CANADA)
EnvironmentGenerally when the topic of climate change comes around first nations and other indigenous people attract a distinguished attention. These people are generally more affected because they tend to live in more severe and vulnerable areas like ; small islands, desert margins, and high altitude zones. Thus, Climate change is directly threatening to indigenous people due to their reliance on natural habitat and low carbon footprint. Therefore it is important for us as a country to understand the adaptation capacities and vulnerabilities of our first nations peoples.
However, our indigenous people are not always the victims. Their knowledge of the natural environment and working in sync with it, allows them to be great observers of the impacts of climate change. Following and attending to the sometimes dramatic changes of the environment is a key part on their traditional lifestyles. Their Community-based and local knowledge offers us as a country key insights and pathways into understanding the broader-scale scientific research with increased precision and nuance.
In conclusion, indigenous societies have put together insightful and intelligent coping strategies to deal with change. Despite the fact that environmental changes caused by climate change are generally unprecedented, indigenous traditional coping strategies continue to provide the crucial building blocks our country needs to tackle the inevitable environmental changes.
Rele Orimalade
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1 Comment(s)
That's a really excellent point about indigenous peoples being particularly affected by climate change due to where they live and their reliance on the land. The importance of the capacity for adaptation is something that I agree is incredibly important, especially considering how fast some environments (e.g. the Canadian Arctic) are changing.
As you said, it's also really important to use indigenous knowledge as well as our own. You could look into citizen science initiatives as well - there may even be some local to you! These involve ordinary people collecting data about their environment and sending it to scientists so they can get a really accurate idea of what the ecology there looks like.
Between the increased awareness of the importance of science and the use of traditional knowledge, it sounds like you have a really good plan for increasing our understanding of and resilience to climate change!
Beth Richardson
Oct 29, 2015