Climate change and the uncertainties associated with them are understood and experienced in different ways by diverse actors. Local people experience climate change by everyday changes or by some inexplicable changes in weather, whereas climate scientists look at both weather and climate, mainly focussing on long-term changes. Policymakers and planners operate on shorter time scales and their activities are governed by other pressing issues in hand that impede financial investments in longer-term adaptation.
Uncertainties in climate projections are high and their combination with political and economic drivers of change make local effects even harder to predict. For many local people uncertainties is not something entirely new as they are attuned with changing seasons, resource fluctuations, or extreme events. Historically seeing, local people had developed strategies and methods to deal with these ecological uncertainties and variability. Then why are the uncertainties associated with climate change being given so much attention? This is because climate change and its effects on other drivers of change present a radical uncertainty that is pushing the marginalized and poor people to the limits of coping. So, climate change as a cause of change for the local people is leading to a shift in their social, physical, and economic worlds. But the theorizing of uncertainties from above by experts, scientists, modelers has little to do with how people understand, live, and cope with them in day-to-day activities.
Most of the regional climate action plans have a hard time dealing with uncertainties. This may be due to a lack of sufficient data, funding, time, or mindsets of people prioritizing short-term needs over long-term needs. The pathways that are adopted to deal with them prominently range between capitalistic and growth-driven trajectories to lack of interest and neglect of the susceptibility of poor people. Most of the case studies show that a techno-managerial approach is generally adopted to combat uncertainties. But not always do these techno-managerial and engineering solutions serve their purpose as they tend to ignore local realities, knowledge systems and can fail in the face of local dynamics or even harm certain groups that usually tend to be poor people.
The notion of climate change catastrophes and uncertainties also emerge as an excuse for bureaucratic inaction to improve the livelihood of the locals. It can also be manufactured to meet certain political ends. A good example of this is the removal of people in Mumbai (India) from the coastal fringe and flood-prone areas for climate adaptation and flood protection most of which were later acquired by developers and sold to elites. These lead to a feeling of helplessness among the local people who are subjected to livelihood transition in the context of realistic adaptation options. Some of these top-down approaches to combat climate change and its related uncertainties hamper locally needed and socially fair adaptation options that can increase the livelihood options as well as ease the pressure on natural resources.
One way to address these issues is also to incorporate the available indigenous knowledge that has evolved through adaptive learning based on past mistakes and knowledge of the environment. There are indeed limits to local knowledge in the face of large-scale climate-related uncertainties but the way forward can be to form hybrid alliances among the various actors (policymakers, scientists, local people) as the indigenous knowledge can complement macro viewpoint by adding local scale. This can offer additional pathways bridging gaps between place-based experiences and expertise on climate change. Resilience and adaptive capacity of local people can be enhanced using the indigenous knowledge as it is applicable in much finer scales which models are not capable to capture and it is also drawing on knowledge across generations that can present some lower-cost options to the vulnerable people.
To summarize, I feel such dialogues show the importance of bringing forward alternate perspectives and solutions while at the same time shedding light on power imbalances that prevent these alternative ways of valuation. It presents the possibility of acknowledging a variety of approaches and knowledge that can help in allowing socially fair and locally needed adaptation.
REFERENCES:
Mehta, Lyla & Srivastava, Shilpi & Adam, Hans & Alankar, & Bose, Shibaji & Ghosh, Upasona & Kumar, V.. (2019). Climate change and uncertainty from ‘above’ and ‘below’: perspectives from India. Regional Environmental Change. 19. 10.1007/s10113-019-01479-7.
Mehta, Lyla & Adam, Hans & Srivastava, Shilpi. (2019). Unpacking uncertainty and climate change from ‘above’ and ‘below’. Regional Environmental Change. 19. 10.1007/s10113-019-01539-y.
Rudiak-Gould, Peter. (2013). “We Have Seen It with Our Own Eyes”: Why We Disagree about Climate Change Visibility. Weather, Climate, and Society. 5. 120-132. 10.1175/WCAS-D-12-00034.1.
I agree with you, Koushikh. I feel there is no one single way to tackle this crisis. It would be naive to think that the same adaptation strategy would work for different places. We need to consider so many aspects like the geographical and political landscape. In the political landscape, as you mentioned, it is the the local knowledge is extremely important in making adaptation strategies. In science we often sit in ivory towers and make decisions for people who already know better. They know better because they have lived close to the nature for longer and understand it. Certainly the local knowledge will give us more ideas and strategies. More inclusive and diverse we are as people studying climate change, the more knowledge and perspective we get. Which is definitely one huge step closer to making better adaptation strategies.