The LICCI Consortium has worked in a globally-coordinated manner to review the literature and collect primary field-based data in 52 research sites in 35 countries to increase the transferability, integration, and scalability of Indigenous and local knowledge into climate change research and policy. The effort to collect locally relevant but cross-culturally comparable information using a common protocol has allowed the LICCI Consortium to identify context-specific singularities of individual sites, but also common trends. The main research results of the LICCI project refer to three different topics:
Climate change impacts on Indigenous Peoples and local communities
- Indigenous Peoples and local communities report numerous, ongoing tangible environmental changes in the local social-ecological systems that they have managed over generations.
- Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ report multiple and synergistic drivers of environmental change, beyond climate change.
- Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ reports of environmental change are not uniform. Rather, reports of climate change impacts vary across gender, age, and level of dependence on the environment.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ climate change adaptation strategies
- Indigenous Peoples and local communities respond to climate change impacts in plural ways and to different degrees.
- Social, political, and cultural barriers hamper Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ adaptive capacity.
- Indigenous and local knowledge systems provide contextualized and suitable adaptation options.
Working with different knowledge systems to contribute to climate change research and policy
- Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ conceptualizations of climate change are not fully transferable to Western scientific categories.
- Understandings of climate change impacts derived from Indigenous and local knowledge systems often, but not always, overlap with scientific understandings.
- Current research practices do not uphold Indigenous and local knowledge systems and ignore environmental impacts of research.
Based on these results, members of the LICCI Consortium advocate for the need to recognize Indigenous Peoples and local communities as legitimate custodians of knowledge regarding climate change and its impacts and as key rights-holders to participate in and contribute to climate change decision-making at both local and international levels. Concrete steps for decision makers and research institutions to put the aforementioned recommendation into action have been outlined in the LICCI Policy Brief (
https://www.licci.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/licci-policy-brief-standard-july.pdf(öffnet in neuem Fenster))
