Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the impacts of global climate change on cultural practices that support biodiversity that are listed to the UNESCO World Heritage List and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Paper long abstract:

Human contributions to biodiversity are often highlighted in negative terms, that is, as contributing to biodiversity loss. This focus is appropriate, given the scale and tempo of species loss that composes the sixth great extinction, authored by humankind through habitat destruction, resource depletion, and overhunting. However, humans also foster biodiversity. At the heart of the concept of biodiversity is the structural idea that assemblages of elements co-constitute one another in unique configurations, whether at the level of genes, species, or ecosystems. Humans, as one species, one genome, amongst others, constitute these assemblages too. Global climate change introduces compounding feedback loops with biodiversity loss, in threatening to impact human co-constitution within biodiversity assemblages. In this paper I examine the impacts of global climate change on cultural practices that support biodiversity, focusing on those implicated practices that are listed to the well-known UNESCO World Heritage List and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. I draw attention to practices on these lists due to their widespread appeal and public recognition, as a platform for drawing attention and coordinating action around the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, and the cultural constitution of biodiversity.