USGS Friday's Findings - August 23, 2024
Indigenous Knowledge: Providing Insight into Climate Change
Title: Indigenous Knowledge: Providing Insight into Climate Change
Date: August 23, 2024, at 2:00-2:30 pm Eastern/11:00 -11:30 am Pacific
Speaker: Nicole Herman-Mercer, Research Social Scientist, USGS Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and Advisor, Department of the Interior - Indigenous Knowledges Coordination Committee
Indigenous Knowledge can provide insights into past conditions and uncover ecosystem level relationships among plants, animals, and humans that can help scientists better understand climate impacts on humans and the environment and identify sustainable pathways for climate adaptation. Including Indigenous Knowledge in USGS science must be done in a respectful, equitable, and reciprocal way guided by Indigenous leadership and oversight. The Arctic Rivers Project provides an example of a research project seeking to include Indigenous Knowledge to improve understanding of ongoing and possible future climate changes in Northern regions. Indigenous communities in Alaska and Canada rely upon rivers to support diverse and complex social, subsistence, and economic systems. As the Arctic and its rivers continue to warm, the ultimate impacts on people, their fisheries and winter travel corridors are highly uncertain. This talk will focus on the approaches of the Arctic Rivers Project to increase collective understanding of the impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities across Alaska and the Yukon River basin with Indigenous leadership and guidance. Through engagement with Indigenous communities, the results of climate and river models are being combined with community-level perspectives, experiences, and knowledge to craft storylines of Arctic change and community resilience. This approach seeks to make quantitative modeling results of potential future conditions more tangible and applicable to community-level adaptation planning.
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