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People everywhere experience changes and events that impact their lives. Knowing how they perceive, react, and adapt to climatic changes and events is helpful in developing strategies to support adaptation to climate change. Mamberamo in Papua, Indonesia, is a sparsely populated watershed of 7.8 million hectares possessing rich tropical forests. Our study compares scientific and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on climate, and analyzes how local people in Mamberamo perceive and react to climatic variations. We compared meteorological data for the region with local views gathered through focus group discussions and interviews in six villages. We explored the local significance of seasonality, climate variability, and climate change. Mamberamo is subject to strikingly low levels of climatic variation; nonetheless local people highlighted certain problematic climate-related events such as floods and droughts. As our results illustrate, the implications vary markedly among villages. People currently consider climate variation to have little impact on their livelihoods when contrasted with other factors, e.g., logging, mining, infrastructure development, and political decentralization. Nonetheless, increased salinity of water supplies, crop loss due to floods, and reduced hunting success are concerns in specific villages. To gain local engagement, adaptation strategies should initially focus on factors that local people already judge important. Based on our results we demonstrate that TEK, and an assessment of local needs and concerns, provide practical insights for the development and promotion of locally relevant adaptation strategies. These insights offer a foundation for further engagement.

Mobility is a millenary human strategy to deal with environmental change. An outstanding example of mobility is transhumance, an ancient pastoralist practice consisting of the seasonal migration of livestock between ecological regions following peaks in pasture productivity. The maintenance of transhumance depends partly on the preservation of related traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We (a) identified and characterized social groups that hold transhumance-related TEK, (b) analyzed trends in transhumance-related TEK across generations and social groups, (c) examined the factors that influence variation in levels of TEK, and (d) analyzed elements of transhumance-related TEK as examples of adaptive strategies to cope with global change. We used transhumance on the Conquense Drove Road, a major active transhumant network in Spain, as a case study. Through an indepth literature review, participant observation, semistructured interviews, and a focus group discussion, we developed a survey to examine transhumance-related knowledge, practices, and beliefs. We collected survey data from 150 informants. Although a rich body of TEK persisted among transhumant shepherds, we found a marked loss of TEK among transhumants born after 1975, who scored one-fifth lower on survey items than other generations. The maintenance of transhumance on foot is the most important factor influencing TEK preservation. We conclude that in developed country settings, maintaining conditions for herd mobility can contribute to enhancing the adaptive capacity of agrarian societies to cope with global environmental change.

For at least the past 8000 years, small-scale farmers in semi-arid environments have had to mitigate shortfalls in crop production due to variation in precipitation and stream flow. To reduce their vulnerability to a shortfall in their food supply, small-scale farmers developed short-term strategies, including storage and community-scale sharing, to mitigate inter-annual variation in crop production, and long-term strategies, such as migration, to mitigate the effects of sustained droughts. We use the archaeological and paleoclimatic records from A.D. 900-1600 in two regions of the American Southwest to explore the nature of variation in the availability of water for crops, and the strategies that enhanced the resilience of prehistoric agricultural production to climatic variation. Drawing on information concerning contemporary small-scale farming in semi-arid environments, we then suggest that the risk coping and mitigation strategies that have endured for millennia are relevant to enhancing the resilience of contemporary farmers' livelihoods to environmental and economic perturbations.