Bonn, Germany
30 March 2009
IPACC delegates from Mali and Chad have come to Bonn to follow up on the UN’s climate negotations. Indigenous peoples from Africa are trying to make their voices heard in the difficult and cumbersome forum. IPACC’s main point is that adaptation is a major issue for Africa. Most of the discussions at the UNFCCC have been about mitigation, emissions and the role of carbon markets. While these talks drag on, Africans are experiencing increasingly extreme weather conditions, not only droughts, but heavy rainfalls, flooding and related problems of diseases, food insecurity, loss of livestock and homes.
The UN reached a serious deadlock in the Poznan Conference of Parties in December 2009. The Bonn meeting in March / April is an important chance to undo the deadlock and move forward to an agreement for the Copenhagen COP at the end of the year. At the heart of the deadlock is the resistance by countries of the South and China to the slow commitments by Western states to fund adaptation and mitigation, and help protect the most vulnerable countries from the effects of climate change.
Indigenous peoples are particularly concerned that unless there are checks and balances, the rush to mitigation could lead to forced removals and further marginalisation of mobile indigenouos peoples. Indigenous peoples in Africa are already experts in adaptation. The whole system of mobility and nomadism exists to protect ecosystems from exhaustion in times of rain uncertainty. Indigenous activists would like to see the UNFCCC affirm their practices and knowledge systems, help mediate conflict with agricultural communities, and create an enabling framework for more advance adaptation in vulnerable rural areas.
In the National Adaptation Programmes of Action, only Uganda has highlighted the importance of Traditional or Indigenous Knowledge, yet even in the Uganda case very few details are given about how the administration will learn from indigenous and local peoples about adaptation and draw this into national strategies and funding plans.
IPACC members are calling for indigenous respresentation on the Adaptation Fund to avoid problems experienced with the Clean Development Mechanism. IPACC is already represented on the Technical Advisory Panel of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility of the World Bank. Presence on the TAP has provided important insights on indigenous needs, knowledge and rights to the member states and World Bank. This model needs to be repeated in the UNFCCC financing and technical processes.
In the UN meetings in Bonn, Uganda again raised the issue of indigenous knowledge. Australia’s comments were closest to IPACC’s position, namely that local knowledge and practices of adaptation should feed up into national policy making.
The USA and South Africa emphasised a balanced approach to adaptation and mitigation, as well as seeing adaptation and development as mutual reinforcing. Costa Rica also pushed for the importance of resilience at ecosystem level which is directly tied to human resilience. South Africa stated its position that adaptation is crucial for Africa.
Norway noted the importance of country driven adaptation with the full participation of local communities. Japan emphasised the importance of knowledge sharing and networking. Bangladesh recommened a vulnerability index to be linked to the Adaptation fund.
Sphere: Related Content
A common misconception created by the dichotomy drawn between traditional and scientific knowledge implies that the former, or local knowledge, is not scientific. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is an approach to analyzing and solving problems. It entails observation, experimentation, theory building, and the like. A study of African, Chinese, Greek, Indian traditional knowledge systems quickly shows that they are embedded in the scientific approach. Indeed, most knowledge building uses a variant of the scientific approach and therefore it is only natural for ‘traditional’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge to mutually reinforce. Incidentally, it is this dualism that was used to relegate indigenous knowledge systems leading to the catastrophic ecological disasters like loss of biodiversity at the behest of ill conceived farming systems. The complex mixed cropping systems, for example, were replaced by “more efficient” systems which have led to soil fertility loss and high dependency on chemical fertilizers. Little wonder organic farming is making a major comeback. Traditional land use practices understood and practiced carbon sequestration. Modern science is struggling to learn how to safely sequester carbon!