Impacts to Tribes & Indigenous People — Indigenous Climate Resilience Network

Tribal Climate Profiles

The Tribes & Climate Change Program at the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals has developed regional profiles for various Tribes and organizations that interact with climate change and its impacts. Profiles are available throughout various regions of Turtle Island within the United States, including the Northeast, Gulf Coast, and Great Lakes regions. To read about specific examples of Tribal climate change challenges and responses, visit the ITEP Tribal Climate Profiles homepage by clicking the button below.

Tribal Climate Profiles

Regions included in ITEP Tribal Climate Profiles. Image from ITEP.

The Status of Tribes and Climate Change Report (STACC Report)

Key Messages

Chapter 1: History of Indigenous Peoples in NCAs

Indigenous peoples have been substantively involved in national and international climate assessments for decades, and this involvement has grown, including more Indigenous engagement and authorship on the third and fourth National Climate Assessments. There is still much work to be done to engage and include Indigenous perspectives, knowledge, and expertise in climate assessments.

Chapter 2: Worldviews, Knowledges, & Social Impacts

Indigenous peoples have their own systems of governance that have norms of behavior for land use and land care.

A growing dialogue among some Indigenous peoples articulates Indigenous knowledge systems through an understanding that all things are interconnected.

Legacies left by colonialism in economic, social, environmental, and educational systems have altered lifeways, traditions, practices, customs, and values of Indigenous peoples, influencing their understanding of how climate change affects their daily lives and opportunities for adaptation.

Chapter 3: Actionable Science & Collaborative Climate Planning

Tribes are investing efforts in adaptation planning and projects to keep their communities, ecosystems, and people healthy. In doing so, they are implementing the most cutting-edge work on climate. Tribal nations are actively creating climate-vulnerability assessments, adaptation plans, and hazard-mitigation plans. Protecting traditional knowledges is an important part of these processes.

Locally relevant and regionally specific information is needed to understand local climate impacts and develop solutions that incorporate local, traditional, and Western knowledge for holistic solutions.

Actionable science co-produced in partnership with Indigenous peoples can support Tribal resource management decision-making.

Chapter 4: Ecosystems & Biodiversity

Indigenous peoples’ worldviews are often explicit in their centering of relationality, responsibility, and reciprocity as critical concepts. These concepts may inform Indigenous responses to climate change impacts. Examples of these impacts include increases in destructive wildfires and invasive species and decreases in ice cover due to warming temperatures. Indigenous actions to address climate change are vast, but some specifics include cultural burning, protection of keystone species, and observation and evaluation of invasive species before deciding how to respond.

Chapter 4.1: Air

The federal government must uphold Tribal sovereignty, authority, and co-management rights for air quality management. Impediments to exercising sovereignty could be removed. For example, Tribes should be allowed to perform traditional fire-prevention activities on their lands, such as cultural burning of the landscape to prevent wildland fires.

Tribes experience disproportionate impacts from poor air quality, including smoke/fine particulates, heat, and humidity, all of which can be connected to climate change. These factors are believed to impact rates of mortality and morbidity from COVID-19.

Chapter 4.2: Water

Climate change is negatively impacting water quality, increasing ocean acidification, leading to an increase in the frequency and duration of harmful algae and biotoxin events, increasing drought, negatively impacting water and food security, causing coastal inundation, and, in places, increasing riverine flooding. Even water storage reservoirs and flood management infrastructure operations and management are impacted. Each of these impacts can threaten local economies, human and non-human health and wellbeing, and Indigenous lifeways.

Tribes and Alaska Natives are responding to these threats by drawing on traditional knowledge; observing and monitoring water sources and the linked hydrological, climatological, and ecological systems and connections; utilizing new tools; forming partnerships; creating adaptation and contingency plans; and through adaptation itself.

Chapter 4.2.1: Drinking Water Infrastructure

Tens of thousands of Native Americans do not have access to safe drinking water. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate this lack of access.

Operation and maintenance (O&M) of water systems is key to sustainability, cost effectiveness, and, most importantly, the ability to supply safe and reliable drinking water. Proper O&M require adequate funding, staffing, and technical, managerial, and financial training. Proper O&M may become even more critical with climate change as systems respond to increasingly extreme climate events and greater uncertainty with respect to water quantity and quality conditions.

Water infrastructure deficiencies provide opportunities to install climate-resilient infrastructure.

Chapter 5: Health & Wellbeing

Indigenous peoples’ health and wellbeing (HWB) is founded on mutually beneficial relationships among humans, nonhuman relatives, and the environment; therefore, HWB is highly impacted by climate change

Social-emotional health, water security, and first foods security (includes foods, medicines, and technologies) are key aspects of Indigenous peoples’ health and wellbeing that merit increased attention and rapid adaptation at local scales due to Indigenous peoples’ unique cultures and worldviews

Indigenous peoples’ resilience is strong; supporting community-defined climate strategies and capacity building within Indigenous communities will augment resilience.

Chapter 6: Economic Development: Renewables, Sustainable Economies, & Carbon Offsets

Indigenous science, knowledges, philosophies, and heritages guide Tribal self-determination in rediscovering economic sovereignty through pursuing, among other sustainable enterprises, renewable energy development, carbon sequestration via carbon markets, water and food security, and subsistence-based enterprises.

Chapter 7: Energy & a Just Transition

An Indigenous just transition is an Indigenous-led transition to an Indigenous-based, nonextractive, regenerative economy that transforms community planning and ecosystem restoration.

Indigenous peoples have been deeply affected by extractive industries such as the fossil fuel and uranium mining industries.

Tribal lands have tremendous renewable energy development potential, which could help Tribes achieve energy and economic independence, sovereignty, and stability.

Chapter 8: Cultural Resources

Tribal cultural resources include intangible cultural beliefs, practices, and traditions as well as tangible physical sites, landscapes, plants, and animals.

Tribal climate change mitigation strategies should include considerations of both tangible and intangible cultural resources.

Chapter 9: Emergency Management

It is estimated that currently less than 25% of all Tribal nations have an Office of Emergency Management, and less than 10% of those have full-time emergency managers. Without a Tribal emergency management program, it is deeply challenging to implement and adhere to a number of federal mandates and policies.

Native Americans have a long and varied history of storytelling and culturally unique ways of communicating with one another and with other communities. When seeking to communicate with Tribes, this rich tradition of storytelling and oral histories should be incorporated.

Barriers such as a lack of effective leadership at state and federal levels of government have prevented Tribal emergency management programs from making greater progress on responding to and mitigating climate-driven hazards.

Chapter 10: Protection-in-Place & Community-Led Relocation

Climate change impacts on infrastructure can be an existential threat to communities and profoundly impacts the health, wellbeing, and safety of residents as well as Tribal lands, territories, and resources.

Many Tribal communities are pursuing adaptation actions, including protection-in-place, moving infrastructure within or adjacent to the current site, and community-led relocation.

Lack of funding, agency coordination, local capacity, and technical assistance are the primary barriers to protecting infrastructure.

Nationwide, at least $6.2 billion is needed over the next 50 years to protect, replace, and move existing Tribal infrastructure (ATNI, 2020; DOI, 2020). This amount includes at least $175 million needed annually nationwide over the next 10 years.

Due to inequitable regulatory barriers and program design, small Tribal communities are generally disadvantaged or excluded from federal programs relevant to climate adaptation.

There is an immediate, urgent need for action to support Tribal nations and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Chapter 11: Solid Waste

The component of Tribal solid waste systems that is most affected by climate change and has the furthest reaching implications is that of infrastructure. An infrastructure system that continues to be stressed has lasting impacts on the amount of illegal dumping on Tribal lands, the transportation of waste in and out of Tribal communities, and the supply and demand of local recycling markets.

The data gaps that exist in the world of Tribal solid waste management are extensive and cause a delay in responding to the demands of new conditions created by climate change.

Chapter 12: Emerging Topics

Integrating Tribal workforce development and supporting Tribal Colleges and Universities can lead to greater climate resiliency and Tribal sovereignty and can create opportunities to educate and train future Indigenous generations in climate-related fields if administered additional funding and resources.

There are many climate-related cultural cascades, including economic and social, Indigenous relationships with the natural world, and pandemics.

Tribal nations are sovereign, and the U.S. federal government, in meeting its intent to address climate, environmental justice, and racial justice, should work collaboratively to support Tribes to engage in internal diplomatic relations. Other collaborations across jurisdictions and Tribal governments should be considered to enhance climate-planning efforts.

Tribal Climate Videos

The following videos were developed by a variety of Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples, organizations, projects, and relationships. The videos represent Indigenous perspectives on climate change, impacts to human-environment relationships, and descriptions of Indigenous resiliency, as told by the people themselves.

Wampanoag Tribe:
Native Youth in Science