Indigenous peoples and local communities are already feeling the impacts of climate change, according to firsthand accounts documented in a new study. The authors of the paper, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, say the data provide evidence that climate change impacts on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) are tangible, widespread and affect multiple elements of their ecosystems. “There is the idea existing in the scientific community that local knowledge is not a valid source of knowledge, and the study aims to bridge this gap,” says Victoria Reyes-García, research professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and lead author of the study. The study collected 1,661 firsthand reports of change in 48 sites inhabited by Indigenous peoples and local communities, covering all climate zones and nature-dependent livelihoods across all inhabited continents. The research is the largest global effort to compile and categorize local observations of climate change and its impacts by IPLCs. Based on the information collected, Indigenous peoples and local communities across all continents are facing nuanced impacts of climate change that are hyperlocal. A Turkana family in Kenya. At Lake Turkana, which was one of the study sites, the impacts of erratic rains have made lives tougher for the lake-dependent Indigenous and local communities that already lack access to agricultural lands. Image by Wiesla via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Existing measures to track climate change impacts are barely able to relate to the diverse and complex ways…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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