Indigenous communities around the globe face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation. Now, an international team that includes researchers from Penn State have been awarded $5 million by the U.S. National Science Foundation, along with funding from Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, to investigate how to mitigate these threats.
“Research into Indigenous communities is underfunded, and their knowledge and practices are often overlooked and undermined by government policy,” said Guangqing Chi, professor of rural sociology, demography and public health sciences at Penn State. Chi is a co-investigator on the project. “We want to interlink Indigenous knowledge with Western knowledge in ways that will strengthen community resilience to climate change and support actions that benefit Indigenous peoples.”
According to the investigators, climate change is more impactful on Indigenous communities versus other communities, since it has more direct effects on their lifestyle, health and nutrition.
“There are significant gaps in preparedness for climate change in Indigenous communities, along with limited policymaker understanding on Indigenous knowledge related to climate risks and responses,” said project co-chair James Ford, professor at the University of Leeds in England. “Informed decision making is needed to understand and address these interlinked climate-health stresses.”
To reach this goal, investigators plan to develop and maintain Indigenous Observatories composed of community leaders, decision-makers and researchers among Indigenous communities spanning the United Nation’s seven social cultural regions.
“The observatories will document, monitor and examine the lived experiences, stories, responses and observations of how climate stressors interact with food systems, health and well-being across partner regions and communities as they play out in real-time and across seasons,” said project co-chair Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo, a researcher at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano in Peru.
According to Zavaleta-Cortijo, the current research project was born out of another project called the COVID Observatories. It was created during the pandemic to document the impacts and responses to COVID-19 among Indigenous communities in countries in low, middle and high-income nations.
Post-COVID-19, the researchers decided to continue working together to better understand and respond to threats facing Indigenous communities globally.
“We understood that one main reason Indigenous communities were facing socioeconomic inequalities across countries was that their knowledge was not consistently recognized nor considered valid to inform science and policies,” Zavaleta-Cortijo said.
Currently, there are over 30 researchers from 19 institutions across the world that will contribute to the project. These researchers will work with approximately 100 Indigenous communities in 13 countries including Canada, India, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Ghana, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Kyrgyzstan, among others.
Chi will lead the Kyrgyzstan work by leveraging his previous research with Indigenous people there.
“What ties these diverse communities and cultures together is that they are all undergoing substantial shifts in their food systems due to social, economic and political transitions rooted in colonization and globalization, further exacerbated by climate change,” said Chi, also a co-funded faculty member of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute.
During the three-year project, researchers said they will engage community members to work together to investigate how stressors impact climate-food-health resilience, examine policy responses and work to strengthen climate-food-health resilience. The researchers have already created the Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network, a knowledge-sharing network that will inform policy development and interventions.
Other aspects of the project will kick-off during a meeting this fall in the Satipo District of Peru, home of more than 300 Indigenous communities. Working groups will be established to tackle various aspects of the project.
Chi said he is excited to work with the team to discover Indigenous community needs worldwide and make policy recommendations.
“Once we have co-produced knowledge in collaboration with local communities, we will disseminate knowledge back to Indigenous communities and work with them to better adapt to climate change impacts,” Chi said.
Additional support for the project is being provided by the New Frontiers in Research Fund of Canada, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft of Germany and the UK Research and Innovation.