Introduction

A. Peter Castro, Dan Taylor and David W. Brokensha

Those things that have long gone together are as it were confederate within themselves: whereas new things piece not so well ... they trouble by their inconfirmity.

Sir Francis Bacon

Global climate change is one of the greatest challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century, raising not only urgent scientific and policy issues but also profoundly ethical ones. The people least responsible for the world's present environmental predicament are often the ones most at risk from it. This book presents 15 case studies from across the globe examining how communities and their members are responding to challenges and opportunities presented by climate change. The 29 authors come from many countries, varying educational backgrounds, and different careers. The writers are united by their concern with portraying the motivations, perceptions, and predicaments of people at the local level, generally from poor or marginalized communities, confronting situations arising from global warming. They seek to inform both specialist and wider audiences about the importance of recognizing and respecting local knowledge, capacities, interests, and, crucially, rights. The authors aim to promote both scholarship and action by providing detailed insights about the capacities and constraints of communities, while addressing significant practical, theoretical, and ethical issues. The case studies are distinguished by the diversity of environmental settings (spanning subarctic to equatorial regions), topics (ranging from customary farming practices and industrial wind farms to indigenous cosmologies and the United Nations Collaborative Initative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD)), and approaches (ranging from phenomenology to archaeology). We do not claim that these cases are a representative sample of situations faced by all rural communities and indigenous groups worldwide; however, we feel that the cases portray situations and predicaments faced by many rural people in all continents, especially those relying on agrarian, fishing, and foraging activities for their livelihoods.

Introduction

In the drought-prone mountains near Bati in north-eastern Ethiopia, people recall several distinct times of severe hunger during the 20th century. The famine of 1984, for example, is called '77', in reference to its year (1977) in the Ethiopian national calendar. Some villagers still have a phobia about saying that number, so painful are their memories of death, deprivation, and dislocation. In the distant past a time of famine occurred that became locally known Durbailli, which can be translated as, 'The one that impoverished those who were not aware'. An elder explained its meaning. Some people saw hard times coming, and they took measures to get ready, such as selling cattle before prices collapsed due to distress sales and declining livestock condition. Others responded slowly to signs of impending trouble, and they suffered harshly for their lack of preparedness. People remembered the event not only as a time of local historical significance, but also as a valuable lesson about the importance of awareness, timely action, and survival. For the inhabitants of these highland communities, being prepared is an ongoing creative response to both immediate and long-term vulnerabilities and opportunities. These, for example, range from altering the planting dates for their drought-resistant sorghum according to the area's increasingly variable rainfall, to making use of remittances from family members engaged in labour migration as a diversified income strategy. A central message of our book is that such knowledge, wisdom, and action from communities and indigenous peoples need to be recognized and heeded, especially given the urgent and complex challenge of global climate change.

A warming Earth and hot controversies

Increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases are warming the planet as measured worldwide by average air and ocean temperatures, large-scale snow and ice melting, and global average sea levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premier scientific body for research on the topic, has concluded that evidence for global warming is 'unequivocal' (Parry et al., 2007: 30). For the earth's climates to be changing is not unusual: they are always dynamic, fluctuating since time immemorial between overall wetter and drier, cooler and warmer periods. Past drivers of climate change consisted of natural phenomena such as variation in the earth's orbit or the position and size of land masses, which were beyond human influence. In contrast, the current pattern of greenhouse gas accumulation largely originates from anthropogenic sources, particularly industrialization (Parry et al., 2007). For more than 250 years attaining 'economic development' has involved massive consumption of fossil fuels, deforestation, and other greenhouse gas-emitting processes. While industrial lifestyles have spread, to varying extents, worldwide, a relatively small number of people are responsible for the bulk of such emissions. The United Nations Development Programme estimated in 2007 that the world's richest countries, which constitute 15 per cent of its population, were responsible for nearly half of all carbon dioxide emitted. As E.F. Schumacher (1973) observed long ago in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the 'achievement' of a highly unequal industrialized economy based on supposedly endless consumption and production is a dangerous illusion, ignoring inherent environmental limits and endemic social violence. Unfortunately, maintaining this illusion is in itself a major industry, with powerful interests and sincere sceptics rancorously contesting the existence or importance of global warming. Disbelief and apathy are also fostered by the fact that many uncertainties exist about the current and future manifestations and implications of global warming. Why incur costs and inconvenience for something that might not occur? Yet, as Andrew Revkin (1992) noted two decades ago, the crystal ball may be cloudy, but the message is clear: climate change is happening. Present-day political and social inertia only reduce our ability to respond in a timely and effective manner to these new and threatening circumstances.

Global climate change raises not only significant scientific and policy issues, but also profoundly ethical ones. The people least responsible for the world's present environmental predicament are often the ones most at risk from it (Singer, 2002; UNDP, 2007; Galloway McLean et al., 2009; World Bank, 2010). More than a billion people in developing countries live on less than US$1.25 per day, and their carbon footprints are very, very light. Although deforestation and agriculture account for approximately 30 per cent of global carbon emissions, a large number of rural households contribute only minimally to this process. Furthermore, as has been documented time and time again (to the extent that one truly appreciates 'research' to mean 're-search'), these same rural households often serve as effective natural resource managers, actively working to maintain the ecological integrity and biodiversity of forests, pastures, farmland, wetlands, marine areas, and other environments (for example, see Posey, 1999; Dove, 2006). Ironically, due to their agrarian, herding, fishing, or foraging livelihoods, which are closely connected to the Earth's hydrological cycle, and to their lack of buffers for hard times, they are highly vulnerable to extreme or erratic weather events generated by global warming. In Africa, for example, more than 70 per cent of the population depends on natural resources and agriculture for their livelihoods (Toulmin and Huq, 2006). It is estimated that over 40 per cent of rural Africans reside in arid and semi-arid environments, and yet only 4 per cent of Africa's cropland is irrigated (Juma, 2011: 8). Even those areas that rely heavily on irrigation, such as parts of South Asia, find their water sources threatened, whether by large-scale glacial retreat, shifts in rainfall that produce increased drought or floods, competing users, or environmental mismanagement (Leslie, 2005; Bates et al., 2008).

Care is needed, however, in depicting the nature and extent of climatic vulnerability among rural communities. Crisis narratives in the professional and popular media on rural livelihoods, poverty, and global warming often end up portraying communities and their members as hapless victims, incapable of exercising initiative without outside guidance. In contrast, our case studies document the diverse, dynamic, sophisticated, and effective strategies for survival devised by communities residing in areas characterized by high climatic risk. Without such practices, these communities would have disappeared long ago. These strategies and adaptations rely on detailed and long-term observations of local environments. Yet it is important to bear in mind that rural people do not reside in a timeless arena of simplicity and contentment. As revealed by our case study authors, local responses to shifting weather patterns are taking place in settings experiencing broader, sometimes dramatic, processes of change emanating from the local to the global levels. From the Canadian arctic to South Africa, communities are dealing with a multitude of political, economic, demographic, social, and cultural processes, including market liberalization, decentralisation (at least nominally), introduction of new technologies, population growth, urbanization, labour migration, the spread of mass media, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and so on. Depending on circumstances, these changes may strengthen or weaken the capacity of communities and their members to respond to climate change. The emergence of famine in the war-torn and drought-ravaged southern Somalia in June 2011 sadly illustrates the complex linkage between social vulnerability and rainfall variability. Famine, death, and dislocation are not inevitable results of drought, but the outcome of long-standing insecurity, inadequate public service infrastructure, and other human institutional and behavioural processes.

We contend that the efforts of climate researchers, planners, and policy makers could benefit substantially by taking local knowledge and capacity for innovation into account. Indeed, recognition of this knowledge and capacity, as well as its foundational system of resource rights and use institutions, must serve as a starting point for action, building up climate change-oriented mitigation and adaptation activities around it, rather than doing 'top-down' planning. Environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, and social justice are intimately linked, and local populations need to be engaged as active participants in the design and governance of interventions, not as a matter of courtesy or as a technical strategy, but because it is their right (Leach et al., 2010). At the same time, enabling or enhancing opportunities for local action also allows people to draw on their own capacities and creativity to adapt to, or mitigate, climate change within the complex social and physical environments in which they live (Toulmin and Huq, 2006; Desmarais, 2007; Juma, 2011). Overall, people are more likely to be open to recommendations when they have had a say in their formulation and adoption. Thus, both 'equity' and 'efficiency' reasons exist for participatory approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation: such strategies are responsive to social justice concerns and also more likely to succeed due to their reliance on local capacity.

In fact, many analysts contend climate change adaptations provide an opportunity for promoting reforms and technological innovations that can bring about a more just and sustainable global society (Adger et al., 2009; Ensor and Berger, 2009; Terry, 2009; Pelling, 2011). To do so, climate change adaptations need to go beyond reducing specific climatic risks; instead seeking to transform people's relationship to (and understanding of) nature, as well as their relationships across and within human societies. As Donald Nelson (2009) observes, such an approach requires new awareness, new thinking, new knowledge, and new analytical tools – all major challenges for an entrenched global consumer society informed by Western-dominated views of economy, technology, and science. In this regard the case studies presented here take on an importance by presenting perspectives and experiences that largely emanate from the 'periphery' rather than the 'core' of our global society.

Climate change adaptation presents the prospect for implementing global social reforms, but it also offers the opportunity for installing policies and technical approaches that work against the interests of communities. Concern about global warming, for example, is justifying a new wave of interventions aimed at so-called LULUCF activities – land use, land use change, and forestry. The newly established United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Programme (UN-REDD) now supports conservation projects that are linked to carbon trading arrangements. Other climate change-inspired projects seek increased energy production, including promoting new 'greener' approaches such as wind farms, biofuel production, and various forms of hydropower as a counter to long-standing petroleum and coal extractive industries. As described in several chapters, REDD and these other approaches may offer important economic opportunities for communities and their members, but they also pose significant risks, especially the loss of local control of, or access to, local resources (also see Angelsen, 2009). Attempts to use conservation or development as reasons for interfering with, or taking control over, community resource use are not unprecedented, but connected to longstanding processes of state and market expansion that have resulted in community disruption, dislocation, and marginalization (Castro and Nielsen, 2001). Once again, climate change interventions need to take seriously issues of social justice, including issues such as the recognition of community and aboriginal tenure rights (Lynch, 2011). The notions of 'climate justice' and 'climate equity' – promoting principles of mitigation and adaptation that are just and equitable – are increasingly recognized as vital ingredients in climate change negotiations, planning, and interventions, even if their attainment still falls short (Adger et al., 2009; Terry, 2009; Pelling, 2011).

The case studies

We present 15 case studies from across the globe detailing how communities and their members are responding to challenges and opportunities presented by climate change. The 29 authors come from many countries, varying educational backgrounds, and different careers. The writers are united by their concern with portraying the motivations, perceptions, and predicaments of people at the local level, generally from poor or marginalized communities, confronting situations arising from global warming. They seek to inform both specialist and wider audiences about the importance of recognizing and respecting the knowledge, capacities, interests, and rights of local communities. The authors aim to promote both scholarship and action by providing detailed insights about the capacities and constraints of communities, while addressing significant practical, theoretical, and ethical issues. At the same time the case studies are distinguished by their diversity of environmental settings (spanning subarctic to equatorial regions), topics (ranging from customary farming practices and industrial wind farms to indigenous cosmologies and the UN-REDD), and approaches (from phenomenology to archaeology). We do not claim that these cases are a representative sample of situations faced by all rural communities and indigenous groups worldwide; but we feel that the cases portray situations and predicaments faced by many rural people in all continents, especially those relying on agrarian, fishing, and foraging activities for their livelihoods.

The case studies are grouped regionally, as will be described in the next section. The political and cultural units covered in the case studies vary with the different settings presented by the authors. The Cree communities in Quebec, Canada, studied by Kreg Ettenger, for example, have gained some powers of regional self-determination through treaties. In contrast, the villages described in A. Peter Castro's chapter on Ethiopia constitute the lowest rung in the country's administrative hierarchy. Many of the communities included in this book have experienced social exclusion due to their ethnicity, social class, or other cultural attributes. It should be noted that the authors sometimes differ in their conception of, and priorities about, local or indigenous knowledge. A major industry has grown in academia during the past three decades about the nature of indigenous knowledge, and it is beyond the scope and purpose of this chapter or book to review the nuances of these arguments (see Dove, 2006, for a useful account). The concluding chapter of the book, however, presents some reflections by the editors on the nature and continued relevance of indigenous knowledge in the context of climate change adaptation.