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- Convenors:
-
Paulo Mendes
(UTAD)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Aula 19
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Climate change is on the political and media agendas, yet it remains elusive in many ways. It is often perceived either as a local change in weather patterns and/or as global phenomena too large to be localised. Papers showing local variations in climate change perceptions are welcomed.
Long Abstract:
Climate change is on the political and media agendas, yet it is still an elusive issue. Owing to its regional variability and varying urgency, it is often perceived either as a local change in weather patterns and/or as global phenomena too large to be localised. Papers on the "ethnographic variability of climate change" are welcome, namely those addressing issues of "crisis" on the different regions of the world, relating them to the global picture.
Climate change affects people in communities worldwide, but frequently, other understandings are at the forefront locally, such as those related to economy, conflict, migration, cultural identity or local environmental problems. They are undoubtedly interconnected and this should be acknowledged, but at the same time, ethnographies on climate change should also report how matters directly associated with CO2 emissions are fundamental for the comprehension of fast changing social processes, at the local and global levels. Therefore, we are proposing a panel on how people are responding to climate change, either on notorious "effluent locations" (e.g. coal mining, tar sands, large cattle farms, factories), and on "recipient locations" (e.g. polar regions, Pacific islands, seashores). Papers may focus on political and environmental movements, warfare, refugees, migrations, alternative ways of livelihoods, new economies, or, on the contrary, on the lack of awareness of climate change effects (e.g. ground level ozone on natural parks, methane emissions on artificial lakes). Papers may be based on extensive fieldwork, but comparative and theoretical contributions are also welcomed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Climate and ecological change hit subarctic Yakutia in particular, and have altered the relationship between humans and lakes/meadows. Localizing climate change besides economic adaptation transformed the way Sakhas relate to landscapes traditionally perceived as live entities.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change and the humidification of permafrost soil in subarctic Yakutia have altered the complex and intimate relationship between humans and thermokarst depressions in the last decades. Sakhas who perceived lakes and meadows as live and sentient beings - and to some extent as members of the local community, with whom humans regularly communicate and exchange gifts, are now increasingly losing contact with them.
Theorising the Sakha perspective on current and drastic ecological changes seems difficult in the frames of the Anthropocene idea recognising (in a Cartesian manner) human activity as a dominant influence on the environment, as Sakhas are now facing exactly the opposite problem. They can no longer influence (or predict, alter the behaviour of) neighbouring landscapes. Villagers feel that lakes/meadows now refuse to communicate with them. Anthropologists have argued that to survive the Anthropocene "we" have to engage with alternative ontologies and ways of thinking. Currently, fishermen and trappers in Yakutia are facing with the same problem but from the opposite angle. In order to cope with environmental and agricultural challenges, they have to acquire unfamiliar (and often Cartesian) moralities and ecologies while engaging with lakes/meadows.
Fieldwork carried out on changing fishing and trapping practices between 2002 and 2015 in Central-Yakutia suggest that as a response to environmental change Sakhas are increasingly relating to lakes/meadows according to polyphonic and often incongruent ontologies and moralities in a reflective manner. I argue that localizing climatic change besides economic adaptation involve fundamental transformations in local ontologies also.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the discursive and material translations of Climate Smart Agriculture in Argentina. In particular it explores the narratives surrounding the creation of climate ready soybeans and the socio-technical networks that will be necessary for their deployment at the local level.
Paper long abstract:
Given the effects of climate change on agriculture, participants at the Conventions of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC) on Climate Change have expressed the need to protect humanity's food security. This need has been conceptualized through a guiding framework known as Climate-Smart-Agriculture (CSA) that combines adaptation and mitigation strategies and that include solutions as diverse as weather information technologies and the development of climate-ready seeds. Contributing to the field of anthropological study of climate change, biosecurity, and agricultural biotechnology, this paper addresses the problem of CSA by examining the discursive and material translations and social effects due to the circulation of Soy HB4. First, the paper asks how narratives of climate change are translated from international discussions to national political debates as illustrated by the Argentine case. Second, it asks how these narratives are translated into concrete technological solutions, such as climate-ready seeds, and how these technologies function at the local level. Given the fact that climate change is not a uniform phenomenon and that its effects are not felt homogenously across different geographies, a technological solution with universal presumptions seems paradoxical. How do these seeds travel from the laboratories to the field? What type of socio-technical networks are constructed around uniform climate-ready seeds to make them function in the diverse ecosystems where they are planted?
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on analysis of local responses to the climate change in the Czech Republic. We analyse transfer of ideas, local practices and their tranformations together with potential conflicts that may arise on the local level between different actors and the logics they apply.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents the first findings from ongoing research project that seeks to analyse local responses and adaptation strategies to climate change in the Czech Republic. Urban adaptations to climate change are a new topic in the country, with only a few projects realised in the past years, and with policy documents just being formulated. Empirically, the project is anchored in case studies and focus groups in six selected urban areas or small municipalities (the research is now taking place and will continue till 2019). First we observe the transfers of ideas and practices from other contexts and their transformations occurring in the process, and second we seek to map (potential) conflicts that may arise on the local level between different actors and the logics they apply (e.g. economic profit searched in the adaptation strategies versus seeking environmental justice). Concentration on cultural/ideological context of urban climate change adaptations can help to understand the variety of strategies adopted in different cities and to follow how and why municipalities select between different options. Finally, we analyse individual strategies and perception of climate change by local inhabitants in different areas.
Paper short abstract:
A survey on the accuracy of proverbs containing information on Sierra Neveda's climatic, physical and biological systems suggests that urban areas' residents have less knowledge of climatic proverbs that rural areas' residents and that elders consider that climatic proverbs are not accurate anymore.
Paper long abstract:
In places where global climate models are too coarse to detect the impacts of climate change, Indigenous and Local Knowledge could be an alternative data source that could contribute to our understanding of the local impacts of climate change. We explore whether proverbs, defined as concise and short sentences containing locally accepted truths and teachings, can help in the study of local climate change impacts. We collected local proverbs in five municipalities of the Alta Alpujarra Occidental, Sierra Nevada (Spain) and classified them according to whether they referred to the climatic, physical, or biological systems. We randomly selected 30 proverbs and interviewed local residents (n=97) to assess their 1) knowledge and 2) perception of current accuracy of proverbs. Results show that people in the more urbanized municipalities had a low knowledge of climatic proverbs. Overall, informants -and particularly older informants- considered that many proverbs were not accurate anymore. Climatic proverbs were considered less accurate than proverbs referring to the biological and physical systems. The methodology used in this work could be reproduced in data-deficient areas to understand the local impacts of climate change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how climate change and Javanese cosmology collide in a landslide-prone area and challenge the emotional practices of the farming community in Karanganyar, Central Java. This situation then determines the response strategies in order to mitigate the landslide risk.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change has challenged the emotional practices of the farming community, that lives in a landslide-prone area. For many generations, these emotional practices which are based on their cosmological idea have succeeded to overcome the uncertainty the people face by living in a precarious environment. However, a prolonged rainy season is an anomaly and makes their life more vulnerable. Thus, this paper will discuss the response strategy in order to mitigate the landslide risk in the midst of climate change by exploring the perception of rain and landslides, the economic aspect that emerges during the prolonged rainy season, as well as their practices to reach a state of security. This paper which is based on field research in Karanganyar, Central Java, then shows that even though the climate has changed, the community's perception of landslides remained the same. Therefore, the response strategy to mitigate the risk has also barely improved.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relation between retreating glaciers, snow cover and skilled labour in a glacier ski resort in the Austrian Alps. It will discuss how the changes of the weather are affecting both the cryosphere landscape and the workers' daily work and senses of identity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relation between retreating glaciers, snow cover and skilled labour in a glacier ski resort in the Austrian Alps. Ski resorts are contributing in a substantial way to the
tourist economy in Austria. Moreover, the Alpine landscape with its white peaks along with
skiing as a popular sport have become essential signifiers of national identity after the end of
World War II. However, both snow tourism and identity are facing challenges today because
dramatic and rapid changes in snow and ice are occurring due to the effects of global climate
change. Although glacier ski resorts in Austria have been affected by retreating glaciers since the 1990s, they are considered as the sole remaining "future snow reservations" by scientists and tourist managers. However, I will argue that such future models do hardly correspond to the experiences of skilled workers in Austria's highest glacier ski resort rising to elevations of more than 3.400 metres. Based on my anthropological fieldwork in this alpine cryosphere environment, I will illustrate how retreating glaciers and melting permafrost are affecting the landscape and these male workers' and managers' daily work and identity in deep ways. The profound changes of snow- and icescapes are countered by an extensive range of practices constituting "technological fixes" to solving the problems caused by "unreliable" snow and ice. At the same time, so I will show, these dramatic environmental changes directly impact on the workers' concerns about job security, their affects and senses of identity.
Paper short abstract:
The ocean ecosystem off the coast of Newfoundland is one of the most human impacted areas in the world, threatened by climate change and overfishing. Relying on long-term fieldwork, I will discuss how the slow environmental degradation is experienced, continually reinforced and then forgotten.
Paper long abstract:
Fishery-dependent communities in Newfoundland, Canada are strongly impacted by anthropogenic transformations in the ocean ecosystem and shifting weather patterns caused by climate change. Nevertheless, while the impacts are well perceived and have direct threat to local livelihood, there is little done to stop the environmental change and degradation. Small local disasters - collapse of cod fisheries in 1992, shrimp fisheries in 2015 and currently declining crab fisheries - have left little hope to people in rural Newfoundland. Policy decisions, combined with changing demographics, transformed ecosystem and market conditions have distanced people from their communities and the surrounding environment, creating apathy in the face of inevitable changes. While many still try to recreate the stability the community centered small-scale fisheries once provided, then most understand that the increasing corporate control over coastal fisheries and the flux of youth leaving outports means an end to the life they have known. The neoliberal processes in the fisheries, uncanny environment, and socioeconomic uncertainty leaves little promise for future in rural Newfoundland, leaving people linger in the Anthropocene, disconnected from what they understand as meaningful life.
Relying on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork with fishing communities in rural Newfoundland, this paper will demonstrate if and how fishing people in Newfoundland perceive, experience, and care about climate change when their world has already ended.
Paper short abstract:
his paper aims to highlight the differences between institutional and autochthonous initiatives to combat climate change using the case study of Almeria.
Paper long abstract:
October 2018 was marked by a funding concession from the EU EAFRS fund to the Observatory for agro-ecological innovation against climate change in the South of Spain. They are investigating the possibility of introducing crops that can stand higher saline and hydric stress like quínoa, amaranto and moringa, substituting the region's current crops, like tomato, pepper and cucumber, among others. However, they are not the only ones that have been concerned about Climate Change in the region. In Almeria, where the largest concentration of agricultural greenhouses of the world is located, local growers and residents have for years been wary of the dangerous effect of intensive mono-crop plantations to our climate, including: water scarcity, desertification, insect mutation and loss of endemic species. This paper will address the lack of sustainability of the intensive agriculture structure, and the limitations of the scarce research initiatives that propose palliative measures for the regions long term environmental problems. In contrast, it will expose the case of certain villages surrounding the industrial complex, like Almocita, who are welcoming local growers and residents who adopt whole system thinking to address pressing climate concerns. Adhering to degrowth networks, leasing land to CO2 capturing permaculture initiatives, developing municipal compost projects, communal allotments, collective farms and reforestation projects. Several formulas that are contributing to slow down climate change (in their small measure), but also shaping a new rural identity in which the old and neo-rural settlers are blindly shaping a new way being in response to the negligence of global policies.
Paper short abstract:
Climate change and pollution are having an impact within the fishing practices and culture of local artisanal fishing communities, exacerbating existing uncertainty, struggle and social tensions. Through ethnography it is possible to understand the fishermen's perspective, clarifying misconceptions.
Paper long abstract:
Regarding the impacts of climate change local fishing communities are highly vulnerable social settings. For the last half-century local fishing communities in Portugal have experienced several climate change impacts, such as coastal erosion and fisheries decline, adding to a long history of other adversities, environmental, economical or political.
Currently, the issue of plastic debris brought an extra pressure to the life of local fishing communities as it affects directly their activities and fishing resources. However, as most of the plastic debris, that can be found a shore either in beaches and docks, are considered to stem from fishing activities, and in spite of coastal fishing activities ranging from industrial fisheries to very small artisanal fishing activities and recreational fishing, local artisanal fisherman are held responsible for it. They became thus the focus of environmental movements, blaming them for the litter and pollution of coastal waters.
Misunderstood or not, these pressures added a negative factor to the tense social condition of these fishing communities, impoverished and strongly challenged by other competing economic activities in the same territories, such as tourism, recreational activities and real estate. These environmental pressures also turned up to be revealing of some of the identity struggles these communities face today.
In this paper, I present an ethnographic research based on fieldwork among the local artisanal fishermen of Setúbal, addressing their connection to nature and material culture, as to understand their perspective on the problem of plastic and sea pollution, as part of the global and climate change issue.
Paper short abstract:
As a Peruvian farmer pursues a precedent-setting climate justice lawsuit on the global stage, he faces critique and malicious rumours in his own community. While Andean farmers struggle to address the impacts of climate change, some find it hard to identify with global discourses of climate justice.
Paper long abstract:
The Peruvian farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya is pursuing a precedent-setting climate justice lawsuit against the German energy giant RWE over its contribution to climate change and glacial lake flood risk in the Andes. While the lawsuit has attracted global attention to climate change impacts in Peru, some locals disagree with the framing around flood risk and are critical of Saúl's motives. At an international stage, many see Saúl as a climate justice celebrity who symbolically represents the vulnerable peoples of the world who struggle to engage with the impacts of global warming. Yet in his own village, rumours abound that Saúl is out to get rich rather than help other people. As a shifting and increasingly unpredictable Andean environment leads rural communities to question the prospects of future life, people's understandings of climate change are often ambiguous and contested. Discussions about Saúl's lawsuit bring these difficulties to the fore as people struggle to make sense of why and how the mountains that give them life are changing before their eyes.
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper addresses the lack of climate change discussion in Poland amid an air pollution crisis in the country.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper addresses the issue of a lack of climate change discussion in Poland amid an air pollution crisis in the country. The air pollution, largely caused by state subsidized coal heating, has been one of the major topics in the past years. At the same time, there has been very little attention towards climate change and the CO2 emissions in the public discourse, with some international NGOs actively altering their communication strategies to avoid emphasizing climate issues in Poland. This is often interpreted as a result of a lack of spectacular catastrophic events in the country and a widespread perception that the weather is actually getting 'better'. Moving beyond such assumptions, the paper argues that it is rather due to a conviction of being left out of global histories and unwillingness or inability to locate oneself within global processes. As such, it enables to not only get to gloss over the detrimental effects of climate change, but also avoid feeling any possible responsibility for co-producing the crisis. At the same time, focusing on a local pollution crisis that is not caused by the industry allows for victim-blaming strategies against the poor households instead of tackling the more systemic issues that would inevitably touch the middle and upper class citizens as well as businesses.
Paper short abstract:
Based on extensive fieldwork in a pastoral community of North Eastern Tibet, this paper explores the practice-embodied ways in which herders know about climate and ecological change and respond to its impacts on their livelihoods.
Paper long abstract:
The alpine meadows of the Tibetan plateau provide critical ecosystem services both at local and global scales. In the plateau, where pastoralism has been the predominant land use for millennia, the meadows supply forage to the livestock on which pastoralists depend. On a larger scale, the alpine meadows sequester a significant proportion of the region's carbon, thus playing an important role in the global carbon cycle. However, the warming effect of climate change, combined with current grassland policies restricting livestock grazing, may threaten the ecosystem's ability to continue fulfilling these and other roles (Hopping et al. 2018). Increases in temperature have been observed to date, and climate change is expected to be several times greater in the plateau than the global mean (IPCC, 2007).
Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in a pastoral community of North Eastern Tibet from 2016 to 2018, this paper presents local herders' understandings and responses to climate and ecological change. Through observations of vegetation, soil and livestock condition, as well as weather patterns, pastoralists produce a form of knowledge about climate that is embedded in their herding practice. These observations, together with other non-environmental factors, inform household decision-making on livestock and land management. Herders' responses to their changing environments and livelihoods are discussed in relation to the local impacts of climate change as well as the current context of increasingly rigid allocation of land use rights, pasture management policies targeted at reducing grazing, and intense marketisation of economy.
Paper short abstract:
Basically, the paper will explore the empirical phenomenon told as the Plasticwhale. The discussion will mainly be based on empirical studies. Theoretically, it will reflect up on the approaches/ perspectives from: a) museology, b) social movement, and c) the anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
Turning new-year, in 2017, the zoologist from the University museum of Bergen, department of nature history, was called for an assignment. Indeed in line with the traditional thought of thinking a museum, by collecting and preservation. This time, they were to collect and preserve a whale, stranded on the beach on the islands of Sotra, south of Bergen. The whale was put to death. And its tummy cut up. And there, in the middle of the red bulging slaughtered animal, it comes into view: plastic bags.
Since then, the red slaughter picture goes viral in social media, newspaper, and in the local and national Norwegian television. In the same time, animal pictures and pictures of animals inside, and animal suffering, escalates. On the front page of a Norwegian newspaper we therefor could look into a seagull swallowing a condom, a turtle with the stomach full of plastic, a fish grown into a plastic bottle, more fishes full of plastic, a cow, dead, etc.
Lot of reports and photo in social media, newspaper and television, also affected the Norwegian beaches and coastline, showing up places endlessness of soda corks, q-tips, lashing of blue fishing lace and broken acid barrels. In Western Norway, and in the islands of Sotra, they meanwhile counts records in numbers of people involved in cleaning up the coastline and beaches. 30 organisations are also organising into the new international face book group, called the Plastic Whale Heritage. Here, with aim to stop global marine pollution.
Paper short abstract:
This study identified the effects of climate change and analyzed the indigenous adaptation options of the women farmers. Respondents perceived climate change as evidenced in short rainy season andvariation in period of occurrence of August break and adapt by altering their planting dates yearly.
Paper long abstract:
Rainfall variability is increasingly a source of concern amongst other climatic variables particularly in the rain-fed agricultural regions of the world. Likewise the increasing trend of climate change which has become worrisome as regards its impact on agriculture. Following the Kyoto accord which encourages member countries to engage in adaptation; there is need to investigate women crop farmers' understanding of climate variability and change and their adaptation strategies at the farm level. Thus, this study identified the effects of climate change and analyzed the indigenous adaptation options of the women crop farmers. The primary data used in this study were collected from five villages through multi stage random sampling technique. A total of 120 respondents were interviewed. Descriptive statistics was used in analyzing the data. Results showed that respondents in all the communities perceived that climate change is evidenced in short rainy season, and variation in period of occurrence of August break. The farmers alter their planting dates yearly. They adopted at least one of the following adaptation strategies: multiple cropping, traditional irrigation, crop replanting, mulching, planting of cover crops, and application of local manure. The study recommends the implementation of certain policies to ensure that farmers employ indigenous knowledge maximally.