Planning Meeting for the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Assessment
8-9 September 2008
Sheraton Palo Alto Hotel
Palo Alto, California, USA
Review of relevant assessment processes and their theoretical frameworks
1. Purpose of this review
The primary purpose of this review is to draw lessons from relevant assessments and their frameworks that can be used in developing a conceptual framework for an indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment. It has been prepared in order to provide a background document for the preparation of a draft conceptual framework and methodology for the Assessment (document # 3 for the Palo Alto meeting).
An indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment will require broad-based acceptance to receive world-wide political and scientific credibility. In order to overcome the peer reviewing requirement of the IPCC’s work, it will be important to develop a credible and robust theoretical framework for the assessment.
A well-designed framework for either assessment or action provides a logical structure for evaluating the system, ensures that the essential components of the system are addressed as well as the relationships among those components, gives appropriate weight to the different components of the system, and highlights important assumptions and gaps in understanding[1]. It will also enhance the ability of the synthesis report to draw together the various individual assessments.
A secondary purpose of this document is to provide a brief literature review relating to traditional knowledge and climate change - highlighting the major conceptual and methodological work undertaken in assessments of traditional knowledge and climate change. This part of the document will serve as a first step towards a more comprehensive literature review that will inform a future indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment.
Section 2 of this document briefly outlines the methods used in selecting specific assessments for review; section 3 looks at traditional knowledge and western science; section 4 reviews major international environmental assessment frameworks; and section 5 reviews frameworks used in major climate change impact assessments. Section 6 concentrates on assessments related to traditional knowledge and climate change, with an emphasis on community-based assessments. This section also aims to highlight some of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of these assessments, and their relationship to the conceptual frameworks of the major international assessments reviewed in previous sections. Finally, section 7 draws some preliminary conclusions of the material reviewed and sets the scene for an indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment. Annex 1 provides a list of assessments and other related documents of relevance to traditional knowledge and climate change.
2. Methods
This document is based on a preliminary review of major international environmental assessments, as well as of other (local to global) assessments of relevance to traditional knowledge and climate change. The international assessments reviewed here were selected because of their status as well-accepted intergovernmental efforts and their demonstrated importance for policy-making. The assessments were also selected due to their reliance on an agreed-upon conceptual or theoretical framework.
The review of assessments and studies of relevance to traditional knowledge and climate change aims to be more inclusive in its approach. The list of assessments and relevant documents in Annex 1 is constructed from a variety of sources, including web searches, partner websites, studies cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and other assessments. Donor websites and case study databases (for example the UNFCCC database on local coping strategies) were also searched for relevant information. Because of the wide variety of sources, the list in the Annex is a mixture of published and peer reviewed literature, grey literature, informational websites and videos. The underlying premise was to include all work that might be of importance or relevance to a future indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment.
It should be noted that the review of assessments and other work of relevance to traditional knowledge and climate change is still preliminary and will likely have missed relevant information. It is therefore expected that Annex 1 will be expanded and made more comprehensive with the assistance of project partners as the work progresses. In short, Annex 1 should, at this stage, be viewed as indicative rather than comprehensive.
3. Traditional knowledge and western science
Scientific assessments designed to provide a basis for global policy making have, over the course of their short history, adopted characteristics and procedures that combine an archetypal ‘scientific method’ as understood by western science at its most rigorous with a series of quasi-diplomatic negotiation procedures designed to lead to consensus conclusions. The reasons for this lie in the misgivings with which sovereign states and their negotiators view the potential implications of the assessments and thus of the assessment processes.
Western scientific method has evolved since the Enlightenment to a point where from the mid-nineteenth century onwards results be deemed rigorous and acceptable only by following its procedures. In these assessments such demands have been taken to a new level.
Scientific method is taken to involve a sequential process involving: definition of the question, observation, formulation of hypotheses, experimentation and data collection, analysis, interpretation and conclusions, publication, retesting. Individual bias or preference is eliminated by the public nature of ‘doing science’: placing the hypothesis, experimentation, interpretation and conclusions in the public domain; allowing others to repeat the process to test for fallibility; peer review; encouraging refutation and/or adaptation.
In the case of an assessment such as the IPCC, the political and economic sensitivities are such that this methodology is employed not by a single researcher or a single laboratory, but by as globally broad a sample of climate scientists as possible, from as many countries as possible and conducted under the scrutiny of governments and the media. With the possible exception of the experimentation and data collection phases, the other links in the methodological chain – definition, hypotheses, interpretation and conclusions – are collective activities conducted in public. Only in this way can the – often unpalatable – scientific conclusions be placed on the negotiating table as the indisputably consensus views of the global scientific community.
There may be some variation between global and regional assessments. For example, governments of neighbouring countries who commission a scientific assessment of an issue of common concern may be looking mainly for validation of their concerns and expert advice on policy options, rather than preparing to negotiate policies palatable to parties with divergent views on where the national interest lies. Nevertheless they are still likely to require an assessment methodology that can be defended as ‘unbiased’, ‘rigorous’ and based on the ‘best available science’ to counter the inevitable pressures from domestic and regional vested interests.
It is clear that a global assessment will raise far greater levels of misgiving, criticism and opposition from vested interests at all levels as compared to a regional assessment. The IPCC is an example of how such opposition can be neutralized to the extent possible, such that its findings can form the basis for intergovernmental policy negotiations. It is salutary to compare the success of the IPCC in this regard with the failure of the GBA (Global Biodiversity Assessment) carried out under the auspices on UNEP from 1993 to 1995 and intended to provide the scientific basis for policy making under the Convention on Biological Diversity as it entered into force.
Despite convening a large, representative and authoritative group of scientific experts; adopting similar procedures for data gathering, analysis, editing and review; and producing a unique and authoritative assessment, the GBA was de facto rejected by Parties to the CBD. The cause of this was the failure by UNEP to bring governments on board at the inception of the assessment, thereby not ensuring a binding commitment by governments to consider the outcomes and subsequently enabling them to characterize the GBA as nothing more than another of a series of voluntary external inputs to the Convention process. This was a lesson the future Millennium Ecosystem Assessment would be obliged to learn when it came to consider how to ensure its conclusions would be taken account of by the CBD policy making process.
How does this have a bearing on the conceptual framework to be adopted for an indigenous peoples’ climate change assessment?
As we have seen above, the success or failure assessments intended to place scientific evidence with potentially unpalatable policy conclusions on the negotiating table process revolve around perceptions of ‘science’, ‘balance’ and ‘consensus’. The key questions that an IPCCA needs to address clearly revolve around reservations that will be made regarding scientific method, review and universality.
According to the western paradigm, phenomena that cannot be positively observed or measured cannot exist. Thus modern western thought separates what is verifiable and capable of formulation into universal laws (‘science’) from unverifiable ideas about how the world operates (‘belief’ or ‘superstition’). One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in the way that science has become separated from religion. In pre-modern societies interceding with the divine and healing human sicknesses were one and the same, often undertaken by a single specialist member of the community.
Traditional knowledge, broadly speaking, operates from a different paradigm. It forms the basis of an holistic cosmology. The various separations that have come about in western society over the recent past – science and superstition, healing and intercession with the divine, rationality and spirituality – are not made. Humanity is perceived as an integral part of the cosmos, rather than standing outside (and examining) it.
Therefore, from the perspective of the holders of cosmovisions that have not undergone such separations, it is clearly proper and necessary to honour the animal that allows itself to be hunted so that you and your community may survive, it goes without saying that the plants that re-germinate year after year so that you and your family may eat should be propitiated, there is no mystery about your shaman interceding with spirits in order to guide the destinies of your village or heal your sick, and if your clans and moieties are denominated as jaguars or eagles or tortoises this is because their members really are or are at least descended from jaguars and eagles and tortoises.
The bridges between these epistemologies are few and shaky. Resistance to acknowledging the validity of other cosmovisions is the norm in western science, notwithstanding this science derives from Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Indian and other bodies of knowledge, which in turn derived from prior ‘traditional’ knowledge.
The reality is that it is the western tradition that is deemed to validate the scientific basis of global policy making. Thus the disconnect between western science and traditional knowledge has potentially serious implications for an initiative such as the IPCCA designed to introduce the findings of traditional knowledge systems into the international policy arena on as equal a footing as possible with the findings of western science.
However, in this particular case the gulf may not be as unbridgeable as it can be in other examples. In the fields of medicine, cosmology or human evolution and dispersal there are likely to be major conflicting paradigms. In the case of observed impacts of climate change and implications for cultural survival, there may well be a high degree of coincidence.
For example, indicators of weather and climate – and thus of climate change over time – employed by indigenous and traditional communities may include dates of germination or flowering, timing of migrations, location of nests, rainfall patterns, volumes of melt water and so on. These are indicators familiar to and employed by scientists in the western tradition. In some cases it will be possible to argue that the conclusions of indigenous observations using such indicators can be compared to and validated by observations and records of western scientists - ornithologists or entomologists, for example.
In many cases community perceptions of climate change over time, as evidenced by changes of temperature and rainfall will be able to be validated by official meteorological records, since all countries keep national data and most will have relevant local data.
The sophisticated adaptation strategies that many indigenous and traditional agricultural communities have adopted in response to locally observed climate change – for example, altering the dates or the altitude of planting – can if necessary be replicated in trials by others, thereby fulfilling one of the methodological requirements of western science.
Although some indicators of climatic conditions employed by indigenous and local communities may be unacceptable to, or at least have not been investigated by, western science, there is probably going to be a sufficient level of coincidence between the categories of indicators used in both traditions such as to endow the assessment with a level of recognition that will provide the necessary credibility within the UNFCCC process. The fact that the individual assessments will have been community undertakings will also endow the overall assessment with considerable political weight within the process.
In a real sense the IPCCA may be pushing at an open door as the IPCC has identified local knowledge as an important missing element in its previous assessments and a focus of its work for its next assessment process. The last report of Working Group II, in its cross-chapter case studies observed that “recent studies have emerged that explore how indigenous knowledge can become part of a shared learning effort to address climate-change impacts, mitigation and adaptation, and links with sustainability”.
“Indigenous knowledge is the basis for local-level decision-making in many rural communities. It has value not only for the culture in which it evolves, but also forscientists and planners striving to improve conditions in rural localities. Incorporating indigenous knowledge into climate change policies can lead to the development of effective adaptation strategies that are cost-effective, participatory and sustainable” (IPCC 4AR, WG II, Cross-chapter case studies, p865, citing Robinson and Herbert, 2001).
At its most recent meeting (April 2008, Budapest), the IPCC recognised that there is an increasing need for coordinated treatment of adaptation and mitigation within an integrated sustainable development strategy and the development of regional approaches to complement the global approach, particularly in assessing the impacts of and vulnerability to climate change. The IPCC Bureau will decide on how this and other ‘new’ issues will be incorporated into the mandate and functioning of the Working Groups for the preparation of the fifth assessment due in 2014.
4. Environmental assessment frameworks
The PSR, DPSIR and associated frameworks
All concepts and approaches to environmental assessment seek to link societal pressures with the status of the environment, and explore response options that might improve environmental conditions and manage problems while enhancing (or at least not sacrificing) human well-being. One of the earliest and most commonly used environmental assessment frameworks is the pressure-state-response (PSR) framework. This framework links pressures on the environment that result from human activities with changes in the state (condition) of the environment (land, air, water, etc.). Society then responds to these changes by instituting environmental and economic programmes and policies, which feed back to reduce or mitigate the pressures or repair the natural resource (OECD, 1993). This basic framework has been adopted for environmental reporting by many OECD countries, as well as by the World Bank, and aspects of it are found in almost all later environmental assessment conceptual frameworks, including that of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
The PSR framework was later expanded by the European Environment Agency into the DPSIR framework (Driving Forces-Pressures-State-Impacts-Responses). This framework adds the concept of driving forces (socio-economic and socio-cultural forces driving human activities), which increase or mitigate pressures placed by human activities on the environment. State, or state of the environment, is the condition of the environment. Impacts are the effects of environmental degradation. Responses refer to the responses by society to the environmental situation. The DPSIR framework is used to assess and manage environmental problems, and, because of its circular nature, it can be used to assess the effectiveness of response measures. Figure 1 explains the DPSIR process. (
Figure 1: The DPSIR process
The DPSIR framework is used by UNEP in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) and in country-level State of the Environment reporting. Initiated by UNEP in 1995, a key aim of the GEO Integrated Environment Assessment (GEO/IEA) is to influence decision-making at different levels, from national to global. GEO objectives are, inter alia, to facilitate the production of accessible, but scientifically relevant environmental information to policymakers, and to increase the capacity of governments to use environmental information for decision-making and action planning for sustainable development. The GEO/IEA methodology facilitates wide participation and cooperation among stakeholders at different levels.
The GEO process builds on the concept that assessment and reporting are not goals as such, but tools critical to effective environmental management. By using the DPSIR framework, the GEO process produces the GEO report series and other materials, including data tools for environmental decision-making. The GEO methodology facilitates the integration of the widest possible range of social, economic, political and cultural pressures, and root causes affecting the state of the environment and environmental trends. Every attempt is made to identify cases of state and trends resulting from a combination of pressures, and if possible, to discuss the degree to which each pressure impacts the environment and human health. The assessment evaluates changes in the state of the environment that impact the sustainability of ecosystems and human well-being. An analysis of the effectiveness of policy responses -- for example multilateral environmental agreements -- is a vital part of GEO methodology. Scenarios are used to explore the environmental outlook[2].