‘WATER IS LIFE’: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLACE IDENTITY, WATER AND ADAPTIVE CAPACITY IN FORT RESOLUTION, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES, CANADA

Water is recognised as a fundamental human right in Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT). However, the current and potential effects of climate change coupled with resource development pressures are leading to concerns about maintaining the health and viability of freshwater in the NWT. These intersecting multiple exposures can have far-reaching impacts for NWT residents who rely on water for cultural, spiritual, economic and social purposes. Ongoing changes (e.g., to water quantity, water quality, weather, precipitation and ice dynamics, for example) will increasingly require NWT residents to adapt, seek ways to plan for the future, identify opportunities, and moderate the effects of current and potential future change related to water. Understanding the strategies people employ around adaptation and what shapes adaptive capacity has been a critical focus of the climate change literature, ranging from individual livelihood levels to national and international analyses. Adaptation and adaptive capacity are multi-dimensional concepts, and to date, the majority of adaptation assessment research has focused on objective dimensions of adaptation and adaptive capacity, including financial and human capital. Increasingly, calls are being made to include subjective dimensions in assessments of adaptation and adaptive capacity. Subjective dimensions are abstract, difficult to quantify, non-material and often relate to human characteristics such as perceptions, beliefs and values. Work on subjective dimensions has to date focused on perceptions of risk and capacity to adapt, but has generally been less emphasised in the climate change literature. There is a recognized need to expand understandings of subjective dimensions to include new literatures and adopt approaches that recognize the values and lived experiences of people in a place, including how values both shape and are shaped by experiences of climate-related change. Place identity, a concept rooted in human geography and environmental psychology, offers a novel avenue for exploring subjective dimensions of adaptation and adaptive capacity. The purpose of this dissertation was to address the above gap in the climate change literature, by examining the potential relationships between place identity and adaptation and adaptive capacity, in the context of water resources. This dissertation employed a single, exploratory case study undertaken in collaboration with the community of Fort Resolution, a Dene-Métis community in the southern NWT, located on the shores of Great Slave Lake and near the Slave River and Slave River Delta. Water has been identified as a fundamental aspect of life in Fort Resolution, and contributes to identity and livelihoods. A qualitative data collection strategy was used, consisting of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participatory photography with community youth. Results revealed a bilateral, mutually reinforcing relationship between place identity and adaptation and adaptive capacity, and one that is influenced by community-identified changes to water. In Fort Resolution, connections and identification to water and place are mediated through several core place-value themes, including connections to heritage and the past, health and wellbeing, and social connections, among others. Participants are experiencing changing water conditions that are felt to be impacting use of, and relationship to, water or places mediated by water. Common experiences of water change coalesced around community-identified changes in water quantity and flow, concerns about water quality, and changes in weather, precipitation and ice. While climate change was recognized in some cases as a driver of related changes, attribution of cause was largely linked with resource development upstream of the community. These community-identified changes in water are impacting the place identity of residents, through impacts to places that support maintenance and function of place identity and related place-values. Participants described impacts to rootedness, sense of belonging, self-efficacy, security and continuity of place. In response to identified changes, a series of interrelated adaptation strategies emerged at individual livelihood and collective levels. These adaptation strategies are positively and negatively shaped both by reactions to changing continuity of places that support place identity and a desire to protect such places now and in the future. Study findings contribute to the growing body of work on subjective dimensions of adaptation and adaptive capacity, including consideration of place identity as a subjective dimension in adaptation assessments. In Fort Resolution, core dimensions of adaptation and adaptive capacity, including perceptions of capacity, equity and social capital, are in part shaped by place identity and vice versa. As such, understanding how people relate to and identify with places, and how these relationships influence adaptation and adaptive capacity, can help to identify opportunities for building place-based solutions and collective action situations to address current and future environmental change, particularly with respect to water

The role of culture for coastal disaster risk reduction measures: empirical evidence from northern and southern Europe

Recent and historic high-impact events have demonstrated significant flood risks to many coastal areas in Europe and across the globe. Understanding the behavior of humans in relation to risk management poses grand challenges for both natural and social sciences and humanities. The study analyzes the cultural aspects of coastal risk management and illustrates path-dependencies of concrete disaster risk reduction measures in relation to local contexts in European coastal regions in Northern and South Western Europe. It adopts a comparative approach by targeting risk perception and risk management related to coastal floods and erosion, induced by storms and sea level rise, in two contrasting coastal areas: German coastal state Schleswig–Holstein at the Baltic Sea (especially the communities Eckernförde and Timmendorfer Strand) and the Portuguese barrier island system of Ria Formosa (especially the community of Faro Beach). Both regions are very low lying with only a few meters above sea level and exposed to similar hazards such as erosion and floods induced by coastal storms, and while they are both attractive touristic destinations, they are culturally, socio-economically and politically very different. The geographical and the socio-cultural contexts of the case study regions are assessed first using an explorative approach, followed by an analysis of the relevance of cultural aspects for the implementation of disaster risk reduction measures. The study addresses both first responders (city authorities, citizens) and scholars. It is found that the choice of risk reduction measures hinges on the values underlying people's perspectives about the desired outcomes of specific measures and that the role of identity and meaning making are still undervalued in decision making processes. It concludes that subjective capacities formed by cultural identities, knowledge, trust coupled with a variety of factors of socio-economic and political texture are important to understand local decision making processes. The authors found that lively ‘culture of risk memory’, ‘trust in scientific information and community’ as well as decision making of coastal authorities coupled with inclusiveness and participation of communities in formulating and implementing disaster risk reduction measures are prerequisites for successful collaboration and in turn execution of disaster risk reduction measures.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The ethics of climate-induced community displacement and resettlement

Despite a burgeoning literature considering the ethical implications of climate change more broadly, and the ethics of migration, the nexus between the two issues has not been given enough attention by political theorists. The paper outlines the key nodes in a debate we think should take place, and which will be made even more urgent in the coming decades as climate change impacts on communities least resilient to it

Impacts of adaptation and responsibility framings on attitudes towards climate change mitigation

It is likely that climate change communications and media coverage will increasingly stress the importance of adaptation, yet little is known about whether or how this may affect attitudes towards mitigation. Despite concerns that communicating adaptation could undermine public support for mitigation, previous research has found it can have the opposite effect by increasing risk salience. It is also unclear whether people respond differently to information about mitigation and adaptation depending on whether action is framed as an individual or government responsibility. Using an experimental design, this study sought to examine how public attitudes towards mitigation are influenced by varying climate change messages, and how this might interact with prior attitudes to climate change. UK-based participants (N = 800) read one of four texts in a 2 × 2 design comparing adaptation versus mitigation information and personal versus governmental action. No main effect was found for adaptation versus mitigation framing, nor for individual action versus government policy, but we did observe a series of interaction effects with prior attitudes to climate change. Mitigation and adaptation information affected participants’ responses differently depending on their pre-existing levels of concern about climate change, suggesting that mitigation framings may be more engaging for those with high levels of concern, whereas adaptation framings may be more engaging for low-concern individuals. Government mitigation action appears to engender particularly polarised attitudes according to prior concern. Implications for climate change communications are considered

Insights for Building Community Resilience from Prioritizing Youth in Environmental Change Research

Youths are the next generation to foster community resilience in social–ecological systems. Yet, we have limited evidence on how to engage them effectively in learning about environmental change. One opportunity includes the involvement of youths in research that connects them with older generations who can share their values, experiences, and knowledge related to change. In this community-based study, we designed, assessed, and shared insights from two intergenerational engagement and learning interventions that involved youths in different phases of research in the Saskatchewan River Delta, Canada. For Intervention 1, we involved students as researchers who conducted video and audio recorded interviews with adults, including Elders, during a local festival. For Intervention 2, we involved students as research participants who reflected on audio and video clips that represented data collected in Intervention 1. We found that Intervention 1 was more effective because it connected youths directly with older generations in methods that accommodated creativity for youths and leveraged technology. Engaging the youths as researchers appears to be more effective than involving them as research participants

Bridging science and traditional knowledge to assess cumulative impacts of stressors on ecosystem health

Cumulative environmental impacts driven by anthropogenic stressors lead to disproportionate effects on indigenous communities that are reliant on land and water resources. Understanding and counteracting these effects requires knowledge from multiple sources. Yet the combined use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Scientific Knowledge (SK) has both technical and philosophical hurdles to overcome, and suffers from inherently imbalanced power dynamics that can disfavour the very communities it intends to benefit. In this article, we present a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach for co-producing and blending knowledge about ecosystem health by using an adapted Bayesian Belief Network for the Slave River and Delta region in Canada's Northwest Territories. We highlight how bridging TK and SK with a combination of field data, interview transcripts, existing models, and expert judgement can address key questions about ecosystem health when considerable uncertainty exists. SK indicators (e.g., bird counts, mercury in fish, water depth) were graded as moderate, whereas TK indicators (e.g., bird usage, fish aesthetics, changes to water flow) were graded as being poor in comparison to the past. SK indicators were predominantly spatial (i.e., comparing to other locations) while the TK indicators were predominantly temporal (i.e., comparing across time). After being populated by 16 experts (local harvesters, Elders, governmental representatives, and scientists) using both TK and SK, the model output reported low probabilities that the social-ecological system is healthy as it used to be. We argue that it is novel and important to bridge TK and SK to address the challenges of environmental change such as the cumulative impacts of multiple stressors on ecosystems and the services they provide. This study presents a critical social-ecological tool for widening the evidence-base to a more holistic understanding of the system dynamics of multiple environmental stressors in ecosystems and for developing more effective knowledge-inclusive partnerships between indigenous communities, researchers and policy decision-makers. This represents new transformational empirical insights into how wider knowledge discourses can contribute to more effective adaptive co-management governance practices and solutions for the resilience and sustainability of ecosystems in Northern Canada and other parts of the world with strong indigenous land tenure