Reshaping climate planning: Indigenous women's territorial knowledges and adaptation in Amazonia

Keywords: Amazonia, territorial knowledges, Indigenous, feminist, climate change, adaptation
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 18

Abstract

Indigenous women are one of the most vulnerable populations to climate change. Given the uncertain impacts of climate change in tropical regions like Amazonia, Indigenous knowledges about plants, crops, and land management are key to confront climate change. Yet climate strategies seldom include Indigenous women leaders, their knowledges, and relationships with more-than-humans. The literature on climate adaptation and resilience largely misses those aspects as well, even though feminist political ecology has questioned binary gender categories, and has analyzed the agency of non-human nature in climate risks. In this paper, I argue that the feminist political ecology must be in conversation with scholarship about decolonial and Indigenous feminisms in Latin America, to illuminate how the knowledges and ontologies of Indigenous women leaders can shape climate adaptation planning in Amazonia. To illustrate this, I further draw from fieldwork and collaborative work with the Women’s Council of the Organization of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), a Pan-Amazonian organization. I discuss how, for COICA women leaders, chacras (Indigenous agricultural systems) are knowledge systems that are central to respond to climate change. Additionally, leaders explain that gender roles are complementary rather than binary in Indigenous cultures, and that women relate to more-than-human beings such as water or crops in specific ways. The conclusions discuss avenues for future research in this topic, to continue to unveil how territorial knowledges and ontologies can transform climate planning at different scales.