IRes Climate Hub

With the support of the Waverley Street Foundation, the Indigenous Resilience Center is beginning its long-term commitment to becoming a climate hub. The IRes Climate Hub (the Hub) is utilizing its financial support to develop various components of the overall center.

Climate change, pandemics, droughts, and floods are among a list of perturbations disproportionately impacting Indigenous communities and amplifying food, energy and water (FEW) insecurities. Indigenous communities are only 5% of the world’s population yet they maintain 90% of the cultural diversity and 80% of the worlds remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are deeply connected to the sacred spaces on which they have lived sustainably for thousands of years and gained a repository of deep placed based local knowledge.

Tribes have an urgent need to prepare for and respond to climate change impacts and to do so in a way that is holistic and considers cultural and traditional values. Uncertainties in predicting these impacts because of uncertainty in model projections, lack of community-specific climate and water resources data, and unpredictable interactions among changes, impacts, and factors. Climate adaptation strategies would be most effective if integrated into a broader sustainability agenda rather than as a stand-alone effort. For Native Americans, who have often been left out of discussions, it is also important that adaptation planning be participatory and transparent.

Climate adaptation is directly related to community resilience. Resilience is the ability to maintain desired structure and function of a FEW socio-ecological system under perturbation, such as that associated with climate change or COVID-19 for example. Yet outside of health metrics, FEW resilience frameworks often fail to consider Indigenous perspectives. Existing resilience frameworks aimed to co-manage resources and empower Indigenous people still remain part of an unjust and colonial system and fail to consider political, social and cultural perspectives. Engaging Indigenous perspectives in examining Indigenous resilience may improve, for example, sustainable water resources research and management and facilitate addressing FEW insecurities among Native American communities. FEW technologies can augment adaptive capacity to transform system state to desired structure and function thus increasing resilience, at multiple scales (e.g., household, community and tribal nation).

The IRes Climate Hub will issue mini grant awards for community organizations, tribal entities and non-profit organizations to address climate impacts. Additionally, the Hub will provide grants training, travel, stipends, and training support for community members. Finally, with its effort to assist in empowering our community, the Hub will develop efforts to effectively engage in policy development in various sectors to address the inequities that exists in tribal communities.

The Hub will allow IRes Core Faculty to continue community driven research with specific tribal nations. In addition, the Hub will allow IRes to develop an official system to create a Faculty Affiliation Process and award faculty with start up funds for pilot research projects in respective communities.

The Hub will allow IRes to leverage funding for salary and operation support. Additionally, as a prime deliverable, the Hub will develop a community toolbox/resource portal that will allow tribes to access data, house programming information, and provide technical assistance.

As part of its commitment, the Indigenous Correspondents Program will allow students from the University of Arizona and tribal colleges and universities to gain training in storytelling and sharing their lived experiences on a national platform. The Hub will also allow IRes to support artists, poets, and musicians to be engaged in further sharing the impact of climate change. The Climate Ambassadors Program will also provide focused workshops and training opportunities through a yearly cohort model. This serves as a vehicle for IRes to focus its efforts on student centered programming while including youth and community members, with a particular emphasis on youth involvement.