Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

With the inception of global climate change and its related risks, impacts, and challenges many rural and indigenous communities across the globe are today facing tremendous cultural, economic, and environmental change which is likely going to weaken their adaptability and resilience capacities to climate change. Indigenous and local people have for centuries been known to have the capacity to adapt to environmental change within their ecological environment. However, in the face of profound and continuous global environmental change, some scholars have projected that cultural, biological diversity, as well as local resilience capacities to environmental change, will likely be severely impacted leading to the ultimate loss of these valuable sources of livelihood and survival for the many remote, rural, and local communities across the world. Despite this popular notion that local and indigenous knowledge systems will disappear, the academic vision of local and indigenous knowledge has progressively shifted from viewing it as a static body of knowledge to one of dynamism. Local and indigenous knowledge is being hybridized through the accommodation of new forms of information or its exposition to external socio-economic drivers. Through document review, fieldwork research, interviews, focus group discussions, the findings of this research indicate that indigenous and local adaptation strategies to climate change in agriculture are striving in this region hence, their usefulness and importance must be acknowledged and incorporated into the mainstream developmental and climate change policies, particularly at the local and community level where resources are scarce, and the adaptability capacity is weak.