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Paper short abstract

This paper examines oral narratives of climate change in Romania’s Danube Delta, showing how local residents use storytelling to interpret ecological disruption, preserve cultural identity, and challenge dominant framings of crisis and conservation.

Paper long abstract

As climate change and ecological degradation increasingly affect vulnerable regions, there is growing interest in how local communities narrate environmental disruption. In Romania’s Danube Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage site, experiencing both climate-driven shifts and contested conservation governance, stories of environmental change are embedded in everyday life and oral tradition. Yet these narratives remain underexamined as sources of cultural meaning and environmental knowledge. This paper analyzes oral histories and narrative interviews collected during Fulbright-supported fieldwork in 2024-2025 across three communities in the Danube Delta. It examines how residents perceive and articulate environmental transformation, including climate variability, shifts in water levels, species decline, and socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing on a human security framework and interpretive narrative analysis, the study traces how interviewees frame resilience, belonging, and resistance through storytelling. These stories are shaped by both personal memory and regional folklore, revealing a localized epistemology grounded in relational knowledge of the delta landscape. Preliminary findings suggest that oral narratives function as culturally embedded tools for interpreting ecological instability, preserving place-based identity, and negotiating marginalization. Rather than passive accounts, these stories often challenge external narratives of conservation and crisis by foregrounding lived experience and adaptive knowledge. The paper contributes to the broader scholarship on environmental narrative, folklore, and cultural resilience, as well as the importance of local storytelling practices in shaping responses to ecological change in deltaic and other climate-exposed regions.