Indigenous peoples (IPs) worldwide are confronted by the increasing threat of pollution. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature (n = 686 studies), we present the current state of knowledge on: 1) the exposure and vulnerability of IPs to pollution; 2) the environmental, health, and cultural impacts of pollution upon IPs; and 3) IPs' contributions to prevent, control, limit, and abate pollution from local to global scales. Indigenous peoples experience large burdens of environmental pollution linked to the expansion of commodity frontiers and industrial development, including agricultural, mining, and extractive industries, as well as urban growth, waste dumping, and infrastructure and energy development. Nevertheless, IPs are contributing to limit pollution in different ways, including through environmental monitoring and global policy advocacy, as well as through local resistance toward polluting activities. This work adds to growing evidence of the breadth and depth of environmental injustices faced by IPs worldwide, and we conclude by highlighting the need to increase IPs' engagement in environmental decision-making regarding pollution control. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;16:324-341.
Local communities' dependence on the environment for their livelihood has guided the development of indicators of local weather and climate variability. These indicators are encoded in different forms of oral knowledge. We explore whether people recognize and perceive as accurate one type of such forms of oral knowledge, climaterelated proverbs. We conducted research in the Alta Alpujarra Occidental, Sierra Nevada, Spain. We collected climate-related proverbs and classified them according to whether they referred to the climatic, the physical, or the biological system. We then conducted questionnaires (n=97) to assess informant's ability to recognize a selection of 30 locally relevant proverbs and their perception of the accuracy of the proverb.Climate-related proverbs are abundant and relatively well recognized even though informants consider that many proverbs are not accurate nowadays. Although proverbs' perceived accuracy varied across informant's age, level of schooling, and area of residence, overall proverb's lack of reported accuracy goes in line with climate change trends documented by scientists working in the area. While our findings are limited to a handful of proverbs, they suggest that the identification of mismatches and discrepancies between people's reports of proverbs (lack of) accuracy and scientific assessments could be used to guide future research on climate change impacts.
In the face of global change, the exploration of possible futures of marine socialecological systems (MSES) becomes increasingly important. A variety of models aims at improving our understanding of ecosystem dynamics and complexities by assessing how systems react to internal and external drivers of change. However, these models are often built from a natural-science perspective through a reductionist and top-down knowledge production process that does not engage with the interests, concerns and knowledge of stakeholders. Our work explores different futures of the Peruvian MSES tied to the Humboldt Current Upwelling System (HCUS) through a sequential integrative participatory scenario process. The methodology used opens novel ways to explore, at different contextual levels, the uncertainties of the future and, in doing so, to include diverging world views of different actors. This approach implies a broader social processing of scientific projections about the future and encourages the articulation of different notions of sustainability. We thereby contribute to current scientific discussions on scenario planning in MSES by exploring potential futures through the analysis of narratives, a process that helps to identify plausible future development pathways that can inform different types of ecosystem modeling or policy making.
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