**1. Introduction**

Climate change is a global phenomenon, which impacts different people unevenly [1]. Scientists, politicians, special interest groups, and members of the general public are engaged in extensive debate on climate change issues, including their potential impacts [2]. Research suggests that public beliefs on climate change vary

significantly [3, 4], and different people view the risks associated with climate change differently. Addressing public perceptions of climate-change risk can be challenging, due to the sociocultural construction of risk and its multi-dimensional complexity [5]. Differing perspectives on climate change and associated risks must be understood within specific contexts of climate change—and within interconnected socioeconomic and cultural settings [6]. Because climate change is a complex phenomenon, its risks can be difficult for laypeople to comprehend. Moreover, climate-change awareness and understanding are also influenced by environmental values and political and economic agendas. While climate-change skeptics have accused climate scientists of "alarmism"—of over-interpreting or overreacting to evidence of climate change recent evidence suggests that scientists have been conservative in their projections of risk [7]. For example, Brysse et al. [7] found that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underestimated the expected impacts of climate change; similarly, Rahmstorf et al. [8] found that experts have underestimated expected climatic impacts. Along with opposing perspectives on climate change, problems of "poor (mis)communication," "misinformation," and implicit presumptions have complicated climate-change discourses and risk-communication efforts [5].

Many populations have already started to experience the impacts of climate change [9–11]. As a result of climate change, experts project that populations will experience increasingly extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and flooding and drought events in the future [10]. The intensity of such events is expected to increase over time—and some populations are at greater risk than others. For example, indigenous Peoples across the globe are expected to be among the communities most heavily affected by climate change [1, 12]. In part, this reflects the dependence and close proximity of many indigenous Peoples to their natural environments and resources [1, 12]. In northern Canada, indigenous communities are already experiencing the effects of significant climate changes [13]. For example, members of the Kashechewan First Nation community near the Albany River in the southwestern James Bay region have been evacuated 14 times to 22 different host communities across the Ontario province due to actual flooding or flooding risk because of the potential failure of the dike [14].

The uneven impacts of climate change raise questions of fairness [15]. Given the disproportionate effects of climate change on indigenous communities, it is vital for climate-change risk-communication experts to consider the needs and concerns of indigenous Peoples. It is also important for experts to consider and incorporate tradition into their efforts to address climate change and mitigate its risks. While ample research has been conducted on climate-change risk communication, as well as the role of traditional indigenous knowledge in reducing climate change impacts, little effort has been made to integrate traditional indigenous knowledge into climate-change risk communication—even in the face of mounting climate-change risks. This chapter addresses a gap in the literature by exploring the potential contributions of traditional indigenous and local spatial knowledge systems to climate-change risk communication processes and efforts to understand and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

### **2. Materials and method**

In this chapter, I synthesize information from a range of secondary sources to consider the potential contributions that traditional indigenous knowledge systems can make to risk communication processes. Specifically, I explore how three of the "five convergence areas" developed by Riedlinger and Berkes [16] and "five areas of complementarity"

#### *Climate Change-Related Natural Hazards and Risk Communication: Incorporating Traditional… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108302*

presented by Moller et al. [17] may facilitate the incorporation and co-production of knowledge across scientific and traditional indigenous knowledge systems. Riedlinger and Berkes' five convergence areas (1) local scale expertise; (2) climate history; (3) research hypothesis; (4) community adaptation; and (5) community-based environmental monitoring; I restrict my analysis to climate history; community adaptation, and community-based environmental monitoring. Moller and colleagues' give areas of complementarity include: (1) synchronic-diachronic complementarity; (2) complementary foci on averages versus extremes; (3) interplay between quantitative and qualitative information; (4) science for a better test of mechanisms, traditional indigenous knowledge for better hypothesis; and (5) complementing objectivity with subjectivity.

#### **2.1 Traditional Indigenous knowledge recognition**

European conquests, colonization, and subsequently forced assimilation of Indigenous Peoples into the dominant Eurocentric Canadian culture have had serious and far-reaching implications. Indigenous communities have been relegated to systematic poverty, isolation, and powerlessness as a result of Eurocentric "cultural imperialism and racism" [18]. During the colonization and modernization eras, traditional indigenous knowledge and values were devalued as an "impediment to development" [19]. Unequal power dynamics between western science and traditional knowledge have undermined the potential role that traditional indigenous knowledge-holders can play as active participants in risk-communication decision-making processes.

Advocates, however, have been arguing that Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge should not be treated as "clients" or "stakeholders" in efforts to mitigate the risks of climate change. Instead, their meaningful participation should be engaged at all levels of decision-making, and traditional indigenous knowledge should be treated as coequal and complementary to western scientific knowledge [20]. Indeed, the value of traditional indigenous knowledge systems is increasingly recognized by many scientists, managers, policy-makers, and lawmakers, and traditional indigenous knowledge has become a subject of national and international law [21]. Presently, international institutional structures—such as TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) and other legal instruments—do not provide patent protection to traditional indigenous knowledge [22]. However, initiatives such as the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples (UNPFIP), Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF), and Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) are working toward protecting Indigenous Peoples' rights and traditional knowledge. The IPCC's 32nd Session [10] also recognized traditional indigenous knowledge as an important guiding principle for the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF), which was adopted by its members at the 2010 FCCC Conference in Cancun [23]. This framework highlights the contributions of traditional indigenous knowledge to broader understanding of global climate change including climate-change observations, impacts, and opportunities for adaptation.

While traditional indigenous knowledge has been historically devalued in many fields of scientific and social science research, traditional indigenous knowledge contributions have also been well documented in many fields—including fields of agro-forestry, traditional medicine, biodiversity conservation, customary resource management, applied anthropology, impact assessment, and risk reduction [24]. For example, traditional indigenous knowledge contributions have been made to biological information and ecological insights, resource management, biodiversity conservation, environmental assessment, and ethics [25]. The IPCC [9] has also recognized the value of traditional indigenous knowledge as a basis for developing adaptation and

#### *Natural Hazards – New Insights*

natural-resource-management strategies while responding to environmental change and other forms of change. However, scientists are often skeptical of its importance. Moreover, they tend to value traditional indigenous knowledge after recasting it in scientific terms to make it more rational, empirical, and objective [26]. It is important that one not lose the essence of traditional indigenous knowledge while recasting indigenous indigenous content into scientific.
