The Emic Science of Climate of the Evenki Reindeer Herders. Siberian Indigenous Environmental Knowledge for Redefining an Extreme Event and for Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into IPCC and IPBES Assessments.

Abstract:

This paper was co-written by Lavrillier (an anthropologist) and Gabyshev (a reindeer herder and co-researcher) on the basis of field materials gathered between 2013 and 2020 in Eastern Siberia, with documentation and analysis of complex traditional environmental knowledge. After discussing the methodology of a community-based transdisciplinary observatory for monitoring the climate and environmental changes with herders, the paper reveals some results from their co-production. It presents the emic science of climate (its typologies and concepts) the Evenki use for understanding norms and anomalies, observing and predicting changes, and adaptation. The authors then develop the notion of an “extreme process” and show that it is more suitable than the concept of an “extreme event” (used in climate change studies) for defining how the Evenki face climate change. By analysing several case studies, they define this notion as the interaction between an accumulation of climatic anomalies in different domains and other environmental disruptions. When external factors (economical, political, or industrial) join the mix, it results in a “hybrid extreme process”, which seriously questions the resilience of this nomadic society. We then discuss the possible improvements of the integration of indigenous knowledge into the international IPCC and IPBES assessments.