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In my latest article, “Understanding constraints to adaptation using a community-centred toolkit,” I discuss decolonizing ecological conservation adaptations to anthropomoric caused climate change in Indigenous communities.

In today’s world, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color (BIPOC) communities do and will face the biggest challenges from human-caused climate change. Decolonization is the literal and metaphorical dismantling of systems of power. In the data field, decolonization can look like:

• renewing Indigenous community collaborations
• asking/starting/revising/discontinuing research projects based on what a community does/does not want/need
• data collection practices that adhere to local Indigenous protocols for privacy and sovereignty

Many thanks to the Vezo people and my various international collaborators and co-authors, especially Danielle C. Buffa and Katharine E.T. Thompson for the invitation to co-write.

Article Abstract

Worldwide, marginalized and low-income communities will disproportionately suffer climate change impacts while also retaining the least political power to mitigate their consequences. To adapt to environmental shocks, communities must balance intensifying natural resource consumption with the need to ensure the sustainability of ecosystem provisioning services. Thus, scientists have long been providing policy recommendations that seek to balance humanitarian needs with the best outcomes for the conservation of ecosystems and wildlife. However, many conservation and development practitioners from biological backgrounds receive minimal training in either social research methods or participatory project design. Without a clear understanding of the sociocultural factors shaping decision-making, their initiatives may fail to meet their goals, even when communities support proposed initiatives. This paper explores the underlying assumptions of a community’s agency, or its ability to develop and enact preferred resilience-enhancing adaptations. We present a context-adaptable toolkit to assess community agency, identify barriers to adaptation, and survey perceptions of behaviour change around natural resource conservation and alternative food acquisition strategies. This tool draws on public health and ecology methods to facilitate conversations between community members, practitioners and scientists. We then provide insights from the toolkit’s collaborative development and pilot testing with Vezo fishing communities in southwestern Madagascar.

This article is part of the theme issue Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture.