Native Waters on Arid Lands Podcast

Understanding vulnerabilities

As part of the Native Waters on Arid Lands project, Derek has been working with tribes to proactively increase their resilience to climate change through climate change vulnerability assessments. Climate vulnerability assessments are suites of tools used to help communities determine the extent to which they may be impacted by climate change, and to develop a plan for dealing with those impacts.

“The main strength of a vulnerability assessment isn’t necessarily just to highlight places that a community might have some gaps or weaknesses, but to get some discussion going on what a community should look like in the future,” Derek explains in the podcast.

Planning across sectors

Derek believes that the most successful assessments are those that take a multi-sectoral approach. For example, looking at how water management might be impacting forestry or public health. It is also advisable for tribes to look as far into the future as possible, and to incorporate multiple streams of knowledge.

“The way we interact with our natural world is through different types of knowledge systems,” Derek says. “Some of these are traditional, some of these are local knowledge, some of these are observational. So usually the best adaptation plans that we’ve seen and the best vulnerability assessments that we’ve seen tend to be those that look at the full range of how people understand their relationship with their natural environments.”

NWAL team member Derek Kauneckis of Ohio University leads a climate adaptation and vulnerability assessment workshop during the NWAL 2018 Tribal Summit in Reno, Nev.