Climate Change: A New Threat to Indigenous Lands
While climate change has an environmental problem for these communities, it is also an emerging cultural one. Many indigenous peoples have ways of life that are closely linked to the environment. As it changes, they lose not just their homes but also their traditions and ways of living.
However, despite all this, indigenous communities are adapting. They are using their traditional knowledge to come up with new survival strategies. For example, some Pacific Island communities are starting to grow salt-tolerant crops as a result of soil salinization caused by rising sea levels, while in the Arctic, Inuit hunters post real-time information on ice conditions using social media, thus helping each other to stay safe in a changing environment.