Indigenous science is key to adapting to climate change

From left to right, project collaborators Jennifer Sowerwine, Kathy McCovey, Vikki Preston, Frank Lake, Daniel Sarna-Wojcicki, Megan Mucioki and Shawn Bourque. Funding for the Resilient Agroecosystems under Changing Climate Challenge project was provided by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

UC Berkeley and Karuk Tribe are using Indigenous and Western science to cultivate resilient food systems under changing climatic conditions.

To adapt to climate change, members of the Karuk tribe have identified the importance of monitoring climate stress on plant species and actively managing and restoring healthy ecosystem processes to increase consistency and the quality of their food crops, according to a new report. The Aboriginal territory of the Karuk tribe spans more than one million acres in the Klamath Basin of northern California and southern Oregon.

The Karuk Tribe-UC Berkeley Collaborative has published the results of its four years of collaborative research in its report "Karuk Agroecosystem Resilience and Cultural Foods and Fibers Revitalization Initiative: xúus nu'éethti - we are care for it".

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To assess the impacts of climate change on cultural plants and their habitats and to develop long-term monitoring strategies and tools, this project integrated Indigenous and Western science perspectives.

"Understanding the scale and intensity of climate change as it relates to our cultural resources is essential to developing adequate response plans," said Lisa Morehead-Hillman, Karuk cultural practitioner and co-lead of the project. “Without healthy stands (of trees), our farming practices suffer. We all suffer.

The report authors outline specific location-based management and monitoring actions that will improve the resilience of focal species and cultural habitats to climate change, climate variability, and management threats.

To support the resilience of indigenous cultural agroecosystems and cultural food and fiber species, as well as to strengthen indigenous food sovereignty now and in the future, the authors recommend management, policy, research and following institutions:

• Support the sovereignty of natural resources, data and knowledge of the Karuk tribe through appropriate engagement and tribal oversight.

• Invest in tribal management infrastructure and workforce development to support culturally appropriate and place-based employment opportunities for tribal members and descendants.

• Support co-management and family stewardship of cultural plants and habitats on Karuk Aboriginal Lands.

• Invest in and support the reacquisition of Karuk Aboriginal lands to rebuild the tribal land base and restore habitats and ecosystems.

• Fund research, monitoring and education opportunities that can support youth leadership development, job creation, agro-ecosystem resilience and food sovereignty in the Karuk Aboriginal Territory.

This research builds on the findings of a five-year Karuk Tribe-UC Berkeley collaborative food security project (2012-2018), which found that 92% of all tribal households in the Klamath River Basin experienced some level of food insecurity, and that access to cultural foods was a good predictor of food security, but only 7% of all tribal households had access to good quality cultural foods at all times.< /p>

“This project applies what we have learned from tribal members about food insecurity and climate and land management threats to cultural foods at the landscape level, co-creating methods and tools with our Karuk colleagues to assess and restore the health, quality, and abundance of cultural foods and fibers to promote food security and eco-cultural resilience,” said Jennifer Sowerwine, senior fellow at UC Berkeley and Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension.

The research objectives centered on "assessing the state of the agroecosystem", in which researchers and crop practitioners from UC Berkeley and Karuk assessed the health, quality and yield of 20 focal plants for cultural use prioritized by the Karuk tribe, such as tanoak acorn, evergreen bilberry, bear grass and hazel, as well as the condition of their habitats.

“This project demonstrates the benefits of working with a diverse research partnership in the co-production of climate science using mixed indigenous and Western research and monitoring methods,” said Frank Lake, project collaborator, ecologist USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest researcher and tribesman. is lying...