Nation-level Ecological Footprint accounts are currently produced for more than 150 nations, with multiple calculations available for some nations. The data sets that result from these national assessments typically serve as the basis for

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The use of Local Environmental Knowledge has been considered as an important strategy for adaptive management in the face of Global Environmental Change. However, the unprecedented rates at which global change occurs may pose a challenge to the adaptive capacity of local knowledge systems. In this paper, we use the concept of the shifting baseline syndrome to examine the limits in the adaptive capacity of the local knowledge of an indigenous society facing rapid ecosystem change. We conducted semi-structured interviews regarding perceptions of change in wildlife populations and in intergenerational transmission of knowledge amongst the Tsimane', a group of hunter-gatherers of Bolivian Amazonia (n = 300 adults in 13 villages). We found that the natural baseline against which the Tsimane' measure ecosystem changes might be shifting with every generation as a result of (a) age-related differences in the perception of change and (b) a decrease in the intergenerational sharing of environmental knowledge. Such findings suggest that local knowledge systems might not change at a rate quick enough to adapt to conditions of rapid ecosystem change, hence potentially compromising the adaptive success of the entire social-ecological system. With the current pace of Global Environmental Change, widening the gap between the temporal rates of on-going ecosystem change and the timescale needed for local knowledge systems to adjust to change, efforts to tackle the shifting baseline syndrome are urgent and critical for those who aim to use Local Environmental Knowledge as a tool for adaptive management.

Global environmental change (GEC) is an increasingly discussed phenomenon in the scientific literature as evidence of its presence and impacts continues to grow. Yet, while the documentation of GEC is becoming more readily available, local perceptions of GEC— particularly in small-scale societies—and preferences about how to deal with it, are still largely overlooked. Local knowledge and perceptions of GEC are important in that agents make decisions (including on natural resource management) based on individual perceptions. We carried out a systematic literature review that aims to provide an exhaustive state-of-the-art of the degree to and manner in which the study of local perceptions of change are being addressed in GEC research. We reviewed 126 articles found in peer-reviewed journals (between 1998 and 2014) that address local perceptions of GEC. We used three particular lenses of analysis that are known to influence local perceptions, namely (i) cognition, (ii) culture and knowledge, and (iii) possibilities for adaptation.We present our findings on the geographical distribution of the current research, the most common changes reported, perceived drivers and impacts of change, and local explanations and evaluations of change and impacts. Overall, we found the studies to be geographically biased, lacking methodological reporting, mostly theory based with little primary data, and lacking of indepth analysis of the psychological and ontological influences in perception and implications for adaptation. We provide recommendations for future GEC research and propose the development of a “meta-language” around adaptation, perception, and mediation to encourage a greater appreciation and understanding of the diversity around these phenomena across multiple scales, and improved codesign and facilitation of locally relevant adaptation and mitigation strategies.

A commonality in the economics of happiness literature is that absolute income matters more for the subjective wellbeing of people at low income levels. In this article, we use a large sample of people in rural areas of developing countries with relatively low income levels to test whether subjective wellbeing an increasing function of absolute income in our sample, and to analyze the existence of adaptation and social comparison effects on subjective wellbeing. Our sample includes 6973 rural households in 23 countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The average total income per adult equivalent in our sample was US$1555, whereas levels of subjective wellbeing resembled levels found in previous research using cross-country data. We find that, despite low levels of absolute income, levels of subjective wellbeing of our respondents resemble levels found in previous research using cross-country data. We also find remarkable similarities in many of the determinants of subjective wellbeing previously tested. Our data show that absolute income covariates with subjective wellbeing, but -as for richer samples-the magnitude of the association is lower once we control for adaptation and social comparison. Finally, our results suggest that social comparison has a stronger effect than adaptation in explaining the subjective wellbeing of our sample. Our findings highlight the importance of adaptation and social comparison even at low levels of absolute income.

Existing climate data for the Bolivian Amazonia rely on observations from a few sparse weather stations, interpolated on coarse-resolution grids. At the same time, the region hosts numerous indigenous groups with rich knowledge systems that are hitherto untapped in the quest to understand local climate change. Drawing on an empirical dataset of climate change observations by an Amazonian native society, we assess the potential use of indigenous knowledge for complementing available climate data. We find indigenous observations to be robustly associated with local station data for climatic changes over the last five decades. By contrast, there are discrepancies between gridded climate data and both indigenous observations and local station observations. Indigenous knowledge can be instrumental to enhance our understanding of local climate in data-deficient regions. Indigenous observations offer a tool to ground-truth gridded descriptions of climatic changes, thereby making adaptation strategies more robust at local scales. We contend that the use of indigenous knowledge could help to assist the climate interpolation process and address the prevailing uncertainties in local assessments of climate change.

Researchers have argued that the behavioral adaptations that explain the success of our species are partially cultural, i.e., cumulative and socially transmitted. Thus, understanding the adaptive nature of culture is crucial to understand human evolution. We use a cross-cultural framework and empirical data purposely collected to test whether culturally transmitted and individually appropriated knowledge provides individual returns in terms of hunting yields and health and, by extension, to nutritional status, a proxy for individual adaptive success. Data were collected in three subsistence-oriented societies: the Tsimane' (Amazon), the Baka (Congo Basin), and the Punan (Borneo). Results suggest that variations in individual levels of local environmental knowledge relate to individual hunting returns and to self-reported health, but not to nutritional status. We argue that this paradox can be explained through the prevalence of sharing: individuals achieving higher returns to their knowledge transfer them to the rest of the population, which explains the lack of association between knowledge and nutritional status. The finding is in consonance with previous research highlighting the importance of cultural traits favoring group success, but pushes it forward by elucidating the mechanisms through which individual and group level adaptive forces interact.

ABSTRACT. Research on natural resource management suggests that local perceptions form the basis upon which many small-scale societies monitor availability and change in the stock of common-pool natural resources. In contrast, this literature debates whether local perceptions can be effective in guiding the sustainable management of natural resources. With empirical evidence on this matter still highly limited, we explored the role of local perceptions as drivers of harvesting and management behavior in a small-scale society in Bolivian Amazonia. We conducted structured interviews to capture local perceptions of availability and change in the stock of thatch palm (Geonoma deversa) among the Tsimane', an indigenous society of foragers-horticulturalists (n = 296 adults in 13 villages). We analyzed whether perceptions of availability match estimates of abundance obtained from ecological data and whether differences in perception help to explain harvesting behavior and local management of thatch palm. Perceptions of availability of G. deversa are highly contingent upon the social, economic, and cultural conditions within which the Tsimane' have experienced changes in the availability of the resource, thus giving a better reflection of the historical, rather than of the ecological, dimensions of the changes undergone. Although local perceptions might fall short in precision when scrutinized from an ecological standpoint, their importance in informing sustainable management should not be underestimated. Our findings show that most of the harvesting and management actions that the Tsimane' undertake are, at least partially, shaped by their local perceptions. This paper contributes to the broader literature on natural resource management by providing empirical evidence of the critical role of local perceptions in promoting collective responses for the sustainable management of natural resources.