From BC to Egypt: Four UBC Experts share Indigenous perspectives on climate change at COP27

“When it comes to climate change, we tend to see it as a Western science problem,” says Dr. Pasang Sherpa, a Sharwa anthropologist from Mount Everest region in Nepal and a Wall Scholar at UBC’s Peter Wall Institute.

“We describe it as a scientific process: we talk about greenhouse gases; we talk about the loss of glaciers, of floods, and of extreme events. But climate change is much more complex than that.”

Dr. Sherpa is one of many scholars, scientists and Indigenous knowledge keepers calling for a broadening of context when it comes to conversations about climate change and its impacts.

Her colleague, UBC’s Wall International Indigenous Scholar Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, emphasizes the necessity of considering Indigenous knowledge alongside all other types of knowledge to address the complexity of climate destabilization.

A hereditary Chief of the Huni Kui Indigenous people of the Amazon, and the elected president of the Huni Kui Federation of the State of Acre, Chief Ninawa Huni Kui says, “It is important that we consider Indigenous knowledge as legitimate knowledge.”

Dr. Vanessa Andreotti is interim director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC and served as Chief Ninawa’s translator at COP27.

She says we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis using the same thinking that got us into it.

“Our status quo is coming from a history that actually created the problem,” Dr. Andreotti says. “And we can't find solutions in the same ways of being, and ways of thinking, and ways of doing things, that created the problem.”

Instead, she says, to face climate change we need think outside the dominant paradigm of Western science, and beyond the types of technologies we typically think of.

­“Indigenous people have developed other types of technologies,” she says. “They have advanced technologies of respect, of reverence, of relationship between and of them, and of reciprocity with the land. If we have any hope to change the future, it starts with changing things in the present and repairing our relationship to the planet, to the land, to ourselves, and to other species.”

At Home in BC

The technology of relationship is very important here in BC, says Dr. Shannon Waters, a member of Stz’uminus First Nation, a Clinical Assistant Professor at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and one of UBC’s COP27 delegates.

In her community, Dr. Waters advocates for the security of watersheds: areas of land where rain, snow and groundwater enter larger bodies of water such as streams, lakes and oceans.

When it comes to local climate and environmental issues, she says we need to reframe the types of goals we set. For example, with watershed security, we need to rethink the rigid goal of “achieving” it.

“Watershed security is never ‘achieved,’” Dr. Waters says. “It’s a relationship. You don't ‘achieve’ a marriage, you don't ‘achieve’ motherhood; it's something you maintain and nurture. I think a better definition of watershed security would be a healthy, resilient relationship between communities and watersheds.”

As a Coast Salish person and Western-trained physician, Dr. Waters works at the intersection of Western science and Indigenous knowledge.

“Science is going to give us some information, and I have teachings that give us some information,” says Dr. Waters. “But what do we do with the enormity of what we don't know? I bring it back to a sense of place, to healing relationships with beings that are around you, and accepting that there is a component of a sacred mystery to it.”

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Want to learn more?

Watch a recording of a panel with Dr. Andreotti, Dr. Sherpa and Dr. Waters: COP27 Debrief - Beyond Doomism and Solutionism in Reponse to Climate Change.