LAST week ‘s article provoked thought around traditional knowledge systems of indigenous people and climate change which is believed to be the major cause of droughts and the extreme weather conditions we experience today.
This week the focus is on how traditional knowledge and indigenous people need a role in global climate dialogue and the implications for indigenous or place-based cultures that are facing the imminent and gradual destructive processes of climate change.
There is a significant amount of literature that suggests indigenous people and traditional knowledge are the most vulnerable, natural resource-dependent groups of any country in the world and disproportionately experience the harmful effects of climate change. Less developed countries and their indigenous populations are largely agricultural, dependent on the land for subsistence and economic livelihoods.
Traditional knowledge is the wisdom and practice of indigenous people gained over time through experience and orally passed on from generation to generation and has over the years played a significant part in solving problems, including those related to climate change and variability.
Indigenous people who live close to natural resources often observe the activities around them and are the first to identify and adapt to any changes.
The appearance of certain birds, mating of certain animals and flowering of certain plants are all important signals of changes in time and seasons that are well understood in traditional knowledge systems.
Indigenous people have used biodiversity as a buffer against variation, change and catastrophe; in the face of plague, if one crop fails, another will survive. In coping with risk due to excessive or low rainfall, drought and crop failure, some traditional people grow different crops and varieties with different susceptibility to drought and floods and supplement these by hunting, fishing and gathering wild food plants.
The diversity of crops and food resources is often matched by a similar diversity in location of fields, as a safety measure to ensure that in the face of extreme weather some fields will survive to produce harvestable crops. Adaptation to climate change includes all adjustments in behaviour or economic structure that reduce the vulnerability of society to changes in the climate system.
Whether people can adapt, and for how long, depends on the resources available. Africa is the region most vulnerable to the vagaries of climate change and at the same time has low adaptive capacity. But the people, particularly at the local level, are making efforts to adjust to the changes they observe.
Warming of temperatures through the 20th Century in Africa has been rising and this trend is expected to continue and even to increase significantly, with attendant negative effects on livelihoods.
According to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a medium-high emission scenario would see an increase in annual mean surface air temperatures of between 3 and 4ºC by 2080.
This implies difficult times ahead for local indigenous people who depend directly on natural resources for their livelihoods and have few assets or technologies to cope with the changes to come.
Many indigenous communities are potential libraries of ethno-botanical information and can make precious contributions to conservation policy by sharing taxonomic knowledge and ecosystem management approaches.
Such communities are in a position to provide much-needed improvement in the fields of biotechnology and modern medicine – information that could perish with certain vulnerable plant species, language or diminishing cultural practices.
Those indigenous people who have historically dealt with regular climatic disturbances in relatively harsh environments can also suggest innovative agricultural techniques that can bolster food security. By monitoring adaptation strategies among indigenous peoples and organising a system to disseminate such information, different cultures could empower one another.
The exchange of sustainable technologies between regions with similar agro-climatic and socio-economic conditions would provide support for farmers coping with similar disturbances.
Some organisations like Environment Africa have argued that climate change adaptation research should take into consideration cultural frameworks advocating environmental ethics. Values such as respect, sharing, reciprocity and humility characterise systems of traditional ecological management that seem to operate sustainably in many contemporary communities such as the Shangani and the Ba Tonga in the southern and northern parts of Zimbabwe respectively.
Perhaps most importantly, the collection of traditional knowledge can play a role in helping indigenous people advocate for their rights, legitimise land ownership and apply for adaptation aid, as not all these communities have the experience or platform to pursue collective political action.
In places where civil society and advocacy are lacking, assistance may be required to aid those particularly vulnerable to the repercussions of climate change.
Though full of potential benefits, the illumination of traditional knowledge should not be considered a replacement for Western science, but rather a means of verifying information derived from global, biophysical reports and augmenting human defences against climate change.
It should be remembered that neither indigenous nor scientific communities produce consistently uniform or infallible knowledge.
Generally, however, indigenous people have sustained harmonious relationships with the landscape for many years. By putting into practice ecological knowledge embedded in their culture, they have many times actually increased local biodiversity. 
The need to collect and disseminate these traditions with proper compensation for such knowledge is urgent; globalisation has prompted the urbanisation of younger generations, and the impending death of elders means critical indigenous knowledge may be lost forever.
It remains to be seen whether or not people can combine resources quickly enough to expose and mitigate inequalities resulting from climate change. Like air pollution, climate change is transboundary.
Despite a nation’s involvement or lack thereof in catalysing global warming, the subsequent ecological problems will affect all people and all nations. Extinction of species and sea level rise are a difficult concern borne by the entire globe, but moreso in the developing world, where the contributions to atmosphere pollution have been minimal, even insignificant.
The cumulative effects of climate change on water supplies and farming systems and the habitability of such areas, will provoke drastic economic, political and cultural impacts by broadening the divide between those who can afford to adapt and those who do not have the money, knowledge or time to do so.
On the other hand, victims of climate change are potential agents of solutions, leadership, climatic wisdom and untapped contributions to Western science. Through the increasingly popular method of collecting traditional knowledge in climatically vulnerable areas, scientists have slowly recognised indigenous groups as possessors of information critical to the study of climate change.
This was re-affirmed at the 32nd Session of the IPCC in 2010: “Indigenous or traditional knowledge may prove useful for understanding the potential of certain adaptation strategies that are cost-effective, participatory and sustainable.”
Previous IPCC assessments, however, were unable to access this type of information because, for the most part, traditional knowledge either appears in grey literature outside of peer-reviewed academic forums, or remains in oral form, thereby falling outside the scope of IPCC process.
One significant manifestation of the marginalisation of indigenous peoples from the climate change policy and decision-making is the scarcity of references in the global climate change dialogue to the existing traditional knowledge on climate change.
Such international dialogue has often failed to consider the valuable insights on direct and indirect impacts, as well as mitigation and adaptation approaches, held by indigenous people worldwide. This is particularly evident in the IPCC Assessment Reports released every few years.
The most authoritative and influential reference on climate change in the world, the IPCC Assessment Reports guide governments, policy and decision-making communities, and non-governmental organisations in planning and implementing their actions. Its last assessment noted that indigenous knowledge is ‘an invaluable basis for developing adaptation and natural resource management strategies in response to environmental and other forms of change’.