Browsing by Author "Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro"

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    Local studies provide a global perspective of the impacts of climate change on Indigenous Peoples and local communities
    (2024-01-08) Reyes-García, Victoria; García-Del-Amo, David; Porcuna-Ferrer, Anna; Schlingmann, Anna; Abazeri, Mariam; Attoh, Emmanuel M. N. A. N.; Vieira da Cunha Ávila, Julia; Ayanlade, Ayansina; Babai, Daniel; Benyei, Petra; Calvet-Mir, Laura; Carmona, Rosario; Caviedes, Julián; Chah, Jane; Chakauya, Rumbidzayi; Cuní-Sanchez, Aida; Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro; Galappaththi, Eranga K.; Gerkey, Drew; Graham, Sonia; Guillerminet, Théo; Huanca, Tomás; Ibarra Eliessetch, José Tomás; Junqueira, André B.; Li, Xiaoyue; López-Maldonado, Yolanda; Mattalia, Giulia; Samakov, Aibek; Schunko, Christoph; Seidler, Reinmar; Sharakhmatova, Victoria; Singh, Priyatma; Tofighi-Niaki, Adrien; Torrents-Ticó, Miquel; LICCI Consortium
    Indigenous Peoples and local communities with nature-dependent livelihoods are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, but their experience, knowledge and needs receive inadequate attention in climate research and policy. Here, we discuss three key findings of a collaborative research consortium arising from the Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts project. First, reports of environmental change by Indigenous Peoples and local communities provide holistic, relational, placed-based, culturally-grounded and multi-causal understandings of change, largely focused on processes and elements that are relevant to local livelihoods and cultures. These reports demonstrate that the impacts of climate change intersect with and exacerbate historical effects of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Second, drawing on rich bodies of inter-generational knowledge, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have developed context-specific responses to environmental change grounded in local resources and strategies that often absorb the impacts of multiple drivers of change. Indigenous Peoples and local communities adjust in diverse ways to impacts on their livelihoods, but the adoption of responses often comes at a significant cost due to economic, political, and socio-cultural barriers operating at societal, community, household, and individual levels. Finally, divergent understandings of change challenge generalizations in research examining the human dimensions of climate change. Evidence from Indigenous and local knowledge systems is context-dependent and not always aligned with scientific evidence. Exploring divergent understandings of the concept of change derived from different knowledge systems can yield new insights which may help prioritize research and policy actions to address local needs and priorities.
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    The global relevance of locally grounded ethnobiology
    (2024) Fernández-Llamazares, Álvaro; Teixidor-Toneu, Irene; Armstrong, Chelsey G.; Caviedes, Julián; Ibarra Eliessetch, José Tomás; Lepofsky, Dana; McAlvay, Alex C.; Molnár, Zsolt; Moraes, R. M.; Odonne, Guillaume; Poe, Melissa R.; Sharifian Bahraman, Abolfazl; Turner, Nancy J.
    While ethnobiology is a discipline that focuses on the local, it has an outstanding, but not yet fully realized potential to address global issues. Part of this unrealized potential is that universalistic approaches often do not fully recognize culturally grounded perspectives and there are multiple challenges with scaling up place-based research. However, scalability is paramount to ensure that the intimate and context-specific diversity of human–environmental relationships and understandings are recognized in global-scale planning and policy development. Here, we identify four pathways to enable the scalability of place-based ethnobiological research from the ground up: local-to-global dialogues, aggregation of published data, multi-sited studies, and geospatial analyses. We also discuss some major challenges and consideration to encourage continuous reflexivity in these endeavours and to ensure that scalability does not contribute to unnecessarily decontextualizing, co-opting, or overwriting the epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. As ethnobiology navigates multiple scales of time and space and seeks to increase its breadth, this study shows that the use of deliberately global approaches, when carefully nested within rich field-based and ecological and ethnographically grounded data, can contribute to: (1) upscaling case-specific insights to unveil global patterns and dynamics in the biocultural contexts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; (2) bringing ethnobiological knowledge into resolutions that can influence global environmental research and policy agendas; and (3) enriching ethnobiology’s field-based ethos with a deliberate global analytical focus.