Engagement With Indigenous Peoples and Honoring Traditional Knowledge Systems; Journal of Climatic Change.

The article discusses challenges and results of efforts by the Third National Climate Assessment to include climate change impacts to Native communities. Because Indigenous lands include extreme and marginal environments, where communities have lower adaptive capacity and limited resources, the importance of including Indigenous people in climate assessments is growing. In fact, one of twelve key findings of the NCA was the “particular threats to Indigenous people”. Challenges to the assessment process included representing climate change issues for a vast number of unique lands belonging to 566 federally recognized tribes, and the insufficient data available to quantify the climate-induced changes underway on Native lands.