Local Perceptions of Climate Variability and Change in Tropical Forests of Papua, Indonesia

Abstract

ABSTRACT. People everywhere experience changes and events that impact their lives. Knowing how they perceive, react, and adapt to climatic changes and events is helpful in developing strategies to support adaptation to climate change. Mamberamo in Papua, Indonesia, is a sparsely populated watershed of 7.8 million hectares possessing rich tropical forests. Our study compares scientific and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on climate, and analyzes how local people in Mamberamo perceive and react to climatic variations. We compared meteorological data for the region with local views gathered through focus group discussions and interviews in six villages. We explored the local significance of seasonality, climate variability, and climate change. Mamberamo is subject to strikingly low levels of climatic variation; nonetheless local people highlighted certain problematic climate-related events such as floods and droughts. As our results illustrate, the implications vary markedly among villages. People currently consider climate variation to have little impact on their livelihoods when contrasted with other factors, e.g., logging, mining, infrastructure development, and political decentralization. Nonetheless, increased salinity of water supplies, crop loss due to floods, and reduced hunting success are concerns in specific villages. To gain local engagement, adaptation strategies should initially focus on factors that local people already judge important. Based on our results we demonstrate that TEK, and an assessment of local needs and concerns, provide practical insights for the development and promotion of locally relevant adaptation strategies. These insights offer a foundation for further engagement.

Unseen sentinels: local monitoring and control in conservation’s blind spots

“…Padmanaba et al (2012) describe the process of participatory land planning. Boissière et al (2013) describe our assessment of community views regarding climate variability.…”

“…Many researchers, including ourselves, have noted the environmental trends recognized by local people without necessarily considering the function, scope, and operational details of how this recognition is achieved (e.g., Hellier et al 1999, Lund et al 2010, Basuki et al 2011, Boissière et al 2013, Danielsen et al 2014a, 2014b. Active oversight is implicit in work on traditional resource management (Berkes et al 1998) and in the context of collaborative or participatory monitoring ).…”

Gendered perspectives of ecosystem services: A systematic review

“…However, two case studies concluded that women assigned a higher value or WTP to this ecosystem service (Calvet-Mir et al, 2016;Vivithkeyoonvong and Jourdain, 2017). Boissiere et al (2013) showed that women and men might focus on different types of regulatory services. Men had a greater perception of the potential benefits that tropical forests can have on mitigating drought frequency, while women were more perceptive of their benefits for the mitigation of flood frequency.…”

Local knowledge production, transmission, and the importance of village leaders in a network of Tibetan pastoralists coping with environmental change

“…As in other systems in which social and political changes may have more pressing impacts on local livelihoods and grassland ecosystems than the direct effects of climate change (Boillat and Berkes 2013, Boissière et al 2013, Thébault et al 2014, the environmental changes occurring in Tibet also have an explicitly political dimension. Due to the combined pressures of restrictive grazing policies, declining rangeland health, and growing local populations, people report having more problems with grassland management than in the past, which produces conflicts and leads them to seek out village leaders to resolve both environmental and interpersonal issues.…”