Adaptation Traditions and Climate Change

Biocultural Adaptation of resource management under the effects of climate change

Climate & Cultural Heritage Joint CallClimate science

Indigenous ecological knowledge is one critical aspect of cultural heritage that may provide a source of resiliency, mitigation, and adaptation to the effects of climate change. Cultural heritages relevant to changes induced by climate change include diverse forms of technical knowledge and social customs for resource use (i.e. use rights or ownership).

Another fundamental characteristic for cultural heritage centres on the extent to which a specific cultural heritage is transmitted in a stable fashion across generations (vertical transmission) versus shared quickly amongst a network of contacts (horizontal transmission). Vertical transmission has the advantage of preserving hard-to-discover technical information and stabilizing resource use-rights to avoid conflict, while horizontal transmission enables the diffusion of technical innovations and new social arrangements.

About

The proposed transdisciplinary research will apply cultural transmission models to study the vertical and horizontal transmission dynamics of cultural heritages at four comparative study sites: Hoonah AK, Zhetysu Kazakhstan, Chiapas Mexico, and Khovd Mongolia.

We will marry these socio-cultural data to ecological data on the changes in resource distributions anticipated due to climate change, and then feedback this information to study site stakeholders and partners so they can consider whether they need to alter their traditional levels of vertical versus horizontal transmission for cultural heritage to account for changes brought on by a changing climate.

Community Engagement Outputs:

We will work with communities in all stages of the work, including providing back to local communities information about their cultural heritages may need to shift in response to climate change.

Scientific Outputs:

This study will publish peer-reviewed journal publications that will be among the first to apply the science of evolutionary models for cultural transmission to current adaptations via cultural heritage to the effects of climate change.

Luke Matthews

RAND Corporation

Luke Matthews is a senior behavioral and social scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School. Much of his work focuses on using formal models for cultural diffusion on social networks to better understand how people influence each other. He has applied social network analysis, simulation models, and machine learning to mixed qualitative-quantitative data.

Project consortium

RAND Corporation
Durham University
University of Zürich
Hoonah Indian Association

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Funding agencies

National Science Foundation
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Swiss National Science Foundation

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Parent programme

Climate&Cultural Heritage

Collaborative Research Action by the JPIs on Cultural Heritage and Climate and the Belmont Forum

This Call is jointly organised between the Joint Programming Initiatives Cultural Heritage and Global Change (JPI CH) and Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate) and the Belmont Forum. The Call aims to support transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, to foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and to contribute to knowledge advances and policy change at the global level.

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