The climate crisis presents humanity with countless challenges, and the current tough negotiations at the last COP27 show once again how difficult it is to find common solutions in the fight against global warming. In doing so, we do not always have to build methods and structures from scratch, because many solutions have often already been tried and tested in local contexts in different regions of the world for many years.
The aim of our project is on the one hand to explore synergetic effects between indigenous knowledge structures and local climate stability, and on the other hand to identify their application potentials for future global climate challenges by informing about them.
KlimaLokal – Your Access to Indigenous Knowledge in the Climate Crisis
“Indigenous Peoples have been faced with adaptation challenges for centuries and have developed strategies for resilience in changing environments that can enrich and strengthen current and future adaptation efforts.” – IPCC AR6
Our ClimateLocal podcast aims to provide a stage for Indigenous and local knowledge to inform effective practices for adapting to climate disasters. In four planned podcast episodes, we will talk with local experts and people directly affected by the climate crisis about the beginnings, difficulties, and goals of local initiatives and organizations, and discuss the extent to which these solutions can be implemented on a global scale. The basic approach of these interviews is clearly to talk with, rather than about, specialists and stakeholders about their expertise and experiences.
We have two specific goals in mind in order to make a small contribution to institutional and structural change.
Directly: To educate on indigenous and local practices in the climate crisis through approachable conversations and a prepared collection of materials, thus promoting their awareness and recognition in society.
Indirectly: To critically reflect on knowledge structures that historically and currently marginalize Indigenous groups by having listeners discover experiential stories and climate action that are often unknown in Western societies.
Climate International – How can we learn from each other in the climate crisis?
We do not only want to inform about the different local and indigenous knowledge structures through our podcast, but we also want to facilitate a dialogue on how we can better learn from each other in the climate crisis by including local knowledge structures. To this end, in the second year of the project (fall 2023), we plan to launch an interdisciplinary conversation format on possible uses of local knowledge for future extreme weather events in Europe to explore the specific question:
“What and how can we learn from each other in the future, and does a global perspective help to best address the Ahr Valley disaster?”
About us
We are Elif Bayat, Fabian Ulmer, Samantha Deutesfeld and Till Armbruster and are members of the Studierendenforum im Tönissteiner Kreis e.V. since 2022. As initiators of “KlimaLokal” we work on the project on a voluntary and independent basis.
If you have any questions, suggestions or wishes, we would be happy to hear from you:
klimalokal@toenissteiner-studierendenforum.de
Our project was awarded the Tönissteiner Prize in 2023 and has since been supported by the Tönissteiner Kreis Foundation.