The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON): The Climate-Food-Health Nexus

Indigenous Peoples globally face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation — threats that are rooted in discrimination, land dispossession, and colonization, and span all of the IPCC’s representative key risks.

It is primarily through the nexus with Indigenous food systems that these stresses converge and interact to affect health and well-being.

Indigenous knowledges and practices underpin resilience across the food-climate-health nexus, yet they are overlooked and undermined by government policy.

New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision-making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses.

The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) transforms and rethinks how we understand the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up, building on multiple ways of knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledges and science, and in ways that strengthen community resilience to multiple stresses and support actions that benefit Indigenous Peoples.

We will develop, operationalize, and maintain Indigenous Observatories that are composed of community leaders, Elders, and youth, decision-makers, and researchers among Indigenous communities across the global south and north, and spanning all of the UN's seven social cultural regions.

The Observatories will document, monitor, and examine the lived experiences, stories, responses, and observations of how climate stressors interact with food systems, health, and well-being across partner regions and communities as they play out in real time and across seasons.

This allows us to tease apart the complexity of factors and drivers affecting community resilience and vulnerability and how they differ between and within communities, across seasons, and over time, rooted in the world views and cultures of our Observers.

We will co-generate knowledge and capacity to inform policy development and catalyze actions that build on community strengths and address potential vulnerabilities.

The Observatories provide a vehicle for strengthening the capacity of communities to document their own knowledge on the links between climate, food, and health, and a space to dialogue with decision-makers at regional, national, and global levels on what actions are needed to build resilience.

The global scope of IPON provides a grounding for developing scalable insights to inform decision-making and advocacy for our partners in UN and Indigenous organisations.

Impact

Community impact

Communities across the partner regions are developing (and in some cases) revising climate change plans and seeking support from regional/national governments for risk reduction initiatives. IPON will support these activities through each Pillar.

Specific activities which will underpin impact will vary by region, reflecting the diverse languages, cultures, and social contexts.

But, the partner regions have identified showcasing research results as they emerge through regular radio shows and community Facebook posts, with a focus on profiling community knowledge through the use of stories, photos, videos, maps; organization of discussion sessions; and locally-led data analysis that contributes to climate change planning.

Developing a curriculum on climate-food-health will be co-produced to address young children who are school-going (i.e. India) and pilot interventions based on climate-smart agriculture (i.e. Argentina, Kiribati, South Africa), and recovery of food biodiversity (i.e. Uganda, Peru, Bolivia).

IPON will also work to impart research and documentation skills to local staff of community-based organisations to prepare food diaries, diet timelines and ecological calendars (i.e. Peru, Bolivia and India).

Impact on the partner regions

Climate adaptation is emerging as a priority across the partner regions, yet our own work and that of others highlights significant gaps in preparedness for climate change.

These gaps reflect limited policy-maker understanding on Indigenous knowledge related to climate risks and responses, an absence of evidence on the effectiveness of potential adaptations, and limited knowledge on how non-climatic factors will shape risk.

IPON will provide timely and pertinent information for addressing these needs, aligned to ongoing and planned decision-making processes.

Specific activities to promote impact include production of targeted policy briefs summarizing research findings and policy implications; in-person meetings timed around fieldwork trips; active engagement of team members in climate planning activities; and participation in regional, national, and global working groups on climate policy.

Global impact

Global impact will focus on establishing a new area of research centered around Indigenous understandings of and responses to climate risk, which has wide-ranging potential for reshaping and reconceptualizing how climate risk is studied across diverse fields and regions.

Outputs to achieve this will include publishing findings from the research in high impact journals, including articles profiling and illustrating the approach, alongside presenting the work at leading international conferences.

Global impact will be leveraged by team members positions in various high-level international assessments (e.g. IPCC, IPBES, UNDESA SDG Reports, UNEP GEO-7, Lancet commission on Sustainability in Health Care (LCSH)).

Project website

https://ipon-research.net/