Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares

Links between media communication and local perceptions of climate change in an indigenous society

Indigenous societies hold a great deal of ethnoclimatological knowledge that could potentially be of key importance for both climate change science and local adaptation; yet, we lack studies examining how such knowledge might be shaped by media communication. This study systematically investigates the interplay between local observations of climate change and the reception of media information amongst the Tsimane’, an indigenous society of Bolivian Amazonia where the scientific discourse of anthropogenic climate change has barely reached. Specifically, we conducted a Randomized Evaluation with a sample of 424 household heads in 12 villages to test to what degree local accounts of climate change are influenced by externally influenced awareness. We randomly assigned villages to a treatment and control group, conducted workshops on climate change with villages in the treatment group, and evaluated the effects of information dissemination on individual climate change perceptions. Results of this work suggest that providing climate change information through participatory workshops does not noticeably influence individual perceptions of climate change. Such findings stress the challenges involved in translating between local and scientific framings of climate change, and gives cause for concern about how to integrate indigenous peoples and local knowledge with global climate change policy debates.

The Adaptive Nature of Culture: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Returns of Local Environmental Knowledge in Three Indigenous Societies

Researchers have argued that the behavioral adaptations that explain the success of our species are partially cultural, that is, 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, 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 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.

Schooling, Local Knowledge and Working Memory: A Study among Three Contemporary Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Researchers have analysed whether school and local knowledge complement or substitute each other, but have paid less attention to whether those two learning models use different cognitive strategies. In this study, we use data collected among three contemporary hunter-gatherer societies with relatively low levels of exposure to schooling yet with high levels of local ecological knowledge to test the association between i) schooling and ii) local ecological knowledge and verbal working memory. Participants include 94 people (24 Baka, 25 Punan, and 45 Tsimane’) from whom we collected information on 1) schooling and school related skills (i.e., literacy and numeracy), 2) local knowledge and skills related to hunting and medicinal plants, and 3) working memory. To assess working memory, we applied a multi-trial free recall using words relevant to each cultural setting. People with and without schooling have similar levels of accurate and inaccurate recall, although they differ in their strategies to organize recall: people with schooling have higher results for serial clustering, suggesting better learning with repetition, whereas people without schooling have higher results for semantic clustering, suggesting they organize recall around semantically meaningful categories. Individual levels of local ecological knowledge are not related to accurate recall or organization recall, arguably due to overall high levels of local ecological knowledge. While schooling seems to favour some organization strategies this might come at the expense of some other organization strategies.

Gendered medicinal plant knowledge contributions to adaptive capacity and health sovereignty in Amazonia

Local medical systems are key elements of social-ecological systems as they provide culturally appropriate and locally accessible health care options, especially for populations with scarce access to biomedicine. The adaptive capacity of local medical systems generally rests on two pillars: species diversity and a robust local knowledge system, both threatened by local and global environmental change. We first present a conceptual framework to guide the assessment of knowledge diversity and redundancy in local medicinal knowledge systems through a gender lens. Then, we apply this conceptual framework to our research on the local medicinal plant knowledge of the Tsimane’ Amerindians. Our results suggest that Tsimane’ medicinal plant knowledge is gendered and that the frequency of reported ailments and the redundancy of knowledge used to treat them are positively associated. We discuss the implications of knowledge diversity and redundancy for local knowledge systems’ adaptive capacity, resilience, and health sovereignty.

Peer Evaluation Can Reliably Measure Local Knowledge

We assess the consistency of measures of individual local ecological knowledge obtained through peer evaluation against three standard measures: identification tasks, structured questionnaires, and self-reported skills questionnaires. We collected ethnographic information among the Baka (Congo), the Punan (Borneo), and the Tsimane’ (Amazon) to design site-specific but comparable tasks to measure medicinal plant and hunting knowledge. Scores derived from peer ratings correlate with scores of identification tasks and self-reported skills questionnaires. The higher the number of people rating a subject, the larger the association. Associations were larger for the full sample than for subsamples with high and low rating scores. Peer evaluation can provide a more affordable method in terms of difficulty, time, and budget to study intracultural variation of knowledge, provided that researchers (1) do not aim to describe local knowledge; (2) select culturally recognized domains of knowledge; and (3) use a large and diverse (age, sex, and kinship) group of evaluators.

A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation

Understanding the scale, location and nature conservation values of the lands over which Indigenous Peoples exercise traditional rights is central to implementation of several global conservation and climate agreements. However, spatial information on Indigenous lands has never been aggregated globally. Here, using publicly available geospatial resources, we show that Indigenous Peoples manage or have tenure rights over at least ~38 million km2 in 87 countries or politically distinct areas on all inhabited continents. This represents over a quarter of the world’s land surface, and intersects about 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes (for example, boreal and tropical primary forests, savannas and marshes). Our results add to growing evidence that recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights to land, benefit sharing and institutions is essential to meeting local and global conservation goals. The geospatial analysis presented here indicates that collaborative partnerships involving conservation practitioners, Indigenous Peoples and governments would yield significant benefits for conservation of ecologically valuable landscapes, ecosystems and genes for future generations.Land management and ownership by Indigenous Peoples are critical components of conservation strategies, but information on these has previously never been aggregated. Here, global data is compiled to show that Indigenous Peoples have tenure rights or manage a quarter of the world’s land area and 40% of all protected areas and intact ecosystems.

An empirically tested overlap between indigenous and scientific knowledge of a changing climate in Bolivian Amazonia

Abstract Existing climate data for 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.

Defaunation Through the Eyes of the Tsimane

Defaunation is one of the most critical challenges faced by contemporary hunter-gatherers worldwide. In the present chapter we explore how this global anthropogenic phenomenon is being explained by a hunter-gatherer society: the Tsimane’ of Bolivian Amazonia. First, we briefly review the historical context of contemporary Tsimane’, with a special focus on defaunation trends in their territory. We then draw on ethnographic accounts to understand how this society explains the drivers of defaunation and integrates them in their understanding of the world, and specifically in their mythology. The Tsimane’ perceive widespread defaunation in their territory, which they tend to largely interpret as a result of both natural and supernatural forces, with intertwined arguments. The Tsimane’ think that supernatural deities control animals and, consequently, they largely associate wildlife scarcity with punishments by the spirits in response to disrespectful conducts. As such, defaunation is interpreted as a consequence of (a) direct harm to wildlife populations by the inappropriate hunting and fishing behaviour; and (b) the discontentment of the animal deities for not respecting certain established cultural norms. In the Tsimane’ view, the latter is also aggravated by their recent relative inability to communicate with the spirits, due to the disappearance of shamans. Considering that the way people interpret environmental change can determine their behaviour towards proposed conservation actions, understanding the symbolic dimensions of defaunation is of direct relevance to any initiative aiming for sustainable wildlife management in areas inhabited by hunter-gatherers.

Unravelling local adaptive capacity to climate change in the Bolivian Amazon: the interlinkages between assets, conservation and markets

This paper examines household adaptive capacity to deal with climatic change among the Tsimane’, an indigenous society of the Bolivian Amazon, and explores how exposure to conservation policies and access to markets shape such capacity. We surveyed Tsimane’ adults (77 men and 34 women) living in four communities with different accessibility to the regional markets. The four communities were located in indigenous territories, but two of them overlapped with a co-managed biosphere reserve. We compared households’ capacity for adaptation through indicators of access to social, financial and natural assets, entrepreneurial skills and human resources. We also assessed how conservation and markets condition such capacity. Our results show that, across communities, households clustered in four groups with differentiated adaptive capacity profiles: commoners typically participating in community meetings, vulnerable characterized by low shares of adaptive capacity indicators, leaders typically holding community positions, and subsidized mostly relying in government remittances. Overlap with the biosphere reserve was significantly associated with the adaptive capacity profile of vulnerable households. In contrast, access to markets does not seem to be related to household adaptive capacity. We discuss relevant behavioral and structural factors for current adaptation to climatic changes and priority measures to foster local adaptive capacity in indigenous territories overlapping with protected areas.

Are sacred caves still safe havens for the endemic bats of Madagascar

Despite conservation discourses in Madagascar increasingly emphasizing the role of customary institutions for wildlife management, we know relatively little about their effectiveness. Here, we used semi-structured interviews with 54 adults in eight villages to investigate whether sacred caves and taboos offer conservation benefits for cave-dwelling bats in and around Tsimanampetsotsa National Park, south-west Madagascar. Although some caves were described as sites of spiritual significance for the local communities, most interviewees (c. 76%) did not recognize their present-day sacred status. Similarly, only 22% of the interviewees recognized taboos inhibiting bat hunting and consumption. Legal protection of bats and caves through protected areas was often more widely acknowledged than customary regulations, although up to 30% of the interviewees reported consumption of bats within their communities. Guano extraction was often tolerated in sacred caves in exchange for economic compensation. This may benefit bat conservation by creating incentives for bat protection, although extraction is often performed through destructive and exploitative practices with little benefit for local communities. In view of these results our study questions the extent to which sacred sites, taboos and protected areas offer protection for bats in Madagascar. These results support previous studies documenting the erosion of customary institutions in Madagascar, including the loss of the spiritual values underpinning sacred sites. Given that many Malagasy bats are cave-dwelling species and that most depend on the customary protection of these sites, it is important to obtain a better understanding of the complex interactions between spiritual practices, taboos and protected areas in sustaining bat diversity.