Learning together with Indigenous communities to strengthen resilience at the food-climate-health nexus.
The stresses of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation come together to uniquely challenge the well-being of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, Indigenous knowledge and practices underpinning resilience across the food-climate-health nexus are overlooked and undermined by government policy.
New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision-making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses.
Building a global network of Indigenous Observatories to transform and rethink the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up.
The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) connects Indigenous Observatories of community leaders, decision-makers and researchers to document, monitor and examine the lived experiences, stories, responses and observations of how climate stressors interact with food systems, health and well-being as they play out in real-time and across seasons
The IPON currently includes over 30 researchers from 19 institutions across the world working with approximately 100 Indigenous communities in 13 countries including Canada, India, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Ghana, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Kyrgyzstan, among others.
Members of IPON have been collaborating on environmental change related projects in the global south and north for over a decade. Through this work, we have created networks of trust and reciprocity, strengthened our capacity to conduct applied research, and developed a baseline understanding of the key risks posed by climate change and health emergencies to Indigenous communities.
Dr. Chi will lead the Kyrgyzstan work, building upon previous research and relationships with Indigenous people there.
Strengthening community resilience to multiple stresses, building on community strengths, addressing potential vulnerabilities.
The Observatories provide a vehicle for strengthening the capacity of communities to document their own knowledge on the links between climate, food, and health, and a space to dialogue with decision-makers at regional, national, and global levels on what actions are needed to build resilience. The teams will work together to create knowledge and capacity that can be used to develop policies and actions that build on community strengths and address potential vulnerabilities.
This is a project jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as funding agencies from Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom via the 2023 International Joint Initiative for Research on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Competition.