2007-2010 Climate Change Project

 An urgent challenge of the 21 st century is to understand levels of knowledge, resilience and adaptation and policy needs in populations confronting the local effects of unprecedented global climate change. This project, titled “Assessing Knowledge, Resilience & Adaptation and Policy Needs in Northern Russian Villages Experiencing Unprecedented Climate Change,” represents a novel approach to these ends by advancing knowledge through partnering with rural native communities in northeastern Siberia, Russia to explore ways to effectively address the local issues of global climate change. The primary objective of this research project is to assess the knowledge, resilience and adaptation, and policy needs of rural Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprecedented global climate change. The four-village, three-year study is a collaborative effort involving the active participation of village inhabitants, native specialists and field assistants, an in-country research community and international collaboration. The project is founded on the PI’s fifteen years of ongoing research and work with Viliui Sakha communities and on her fluency in both the Sakha and Russian languages. The project objectives are to: 1) Develop community-levels rosters of past and present knowledge of and adaptation to climate change; 2) Operationalize those roster data to develop measures and gauge the resilience and adaptive capacity of households and communities facing global climate change; 3) Document local elders’ knowledge about climate change that is both applicable and pragmatic for use in contemporary village-level adaptive schemes; 4) Survey the relevant western science on global climate change (beginning in-country and moving to international) in order to fill the gaps in local knowledge to facilitate community-level adaptation and understanding; 5) Appraise policy efforts at the local, regional, Republic and national levels for their utility and make recommendations accordingly. Methods to be employed include: focus groups, semi-structured interviews, surveys and secondary data analysis.

Research Questions, Objectives and Plan of Work

The primary research objective of this project is to assess the knowledge, resilience and adaptation and policy needs of rural Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprecedented climate change. Fieldwork will be ongoing in four Viliui Sakha villages, Elgeeii, Kutana, Khoro and Kuukei. The team will collaborate with these four local communities and a team of in-country research specialists for summary analyses.

The research questions are:

1) What local effects of global climate change are Viliui Sakha communities witnessing and how is it affecting their subsistence survival?

2) What knowledge is there about how Viliui Sakha adapted in the past to climate perturbations and how are contemporary Viliui Sakha adapting to the local effects of global climate change?

3) What knowledge and record is there about past local/regional climate perturbations and what knowledge is being generated on local/ regional/ Republic-wide level about contemporary global climate change?

4) What information about global climate change from other western scientific sources is both relevant and constructive for Viliui Sakha communities?

5) What global climate change policy exists at the local, regional, and national levels, how effective is it for rural Viliui Sakha communities and how can it be made more effective?

The research objectives are:

1) To develop community-levels rosters of past and present knowledge of and adaptation to climate change;

2) To operationalize those roster data to develop measures and gauge the resilience and adaptive capacity of households and communities facing global climate change;

3) To document local elders’ knowledge about climate change that is both applicable and pragmatic for use in contemporary village-level adaptive schemes;

4) To survey the relevant western science on global climate change (beginning in-country and moving to international) in order to fill the gaps in local knowledge to facilitate community-level adaptation and understanding;

5) To appraise policy efforts at the local, regional, Republic and national levels for their utility and make recommendations accordingly.

To these ends the project has three interdependent research areas involving fieldwork by the research team and the communities at large to collect and analyze data according to the following schema: