Doctoral Dissertation Research: Local Perceptions of Hydrological Change and Consequences for Landscape Use Transformations: The Tikuna in Colombia's Amazonia

University Of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, Athens GA

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers have investigated community vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in the face of global climate change, as well as community perceptions of the local-level effects of these global processes. Less attention has been paid to exploring how climate changes are affecting subsistence strategies and socio-cultural systems even though this information is critical for understanding long-term landscape preservation. The research to be undertaken by University of Georgia doctoral student Rocío Rodríguez Granado, with the guidance of Dr. Julie Velasquez Runk and Dr.Theodore Gragson, will contribute to filling that gap through a study of how a local indigenous group is responding to changes in hydrologic cycles. The research will be carried out among the Tikuna, an indigenous people who live in Colombia and who rely on their landscape for hunting and gathering and small-scale agriculture. Preliminary research has shown that the Tikuna are both aware of and are responding to hydrologic changes. The hydrological cycle determines what, where and when subsistence activities take place. The researcher's goal is to document Tikunas' adaptation strategies as an indicator of how environmental change understandings are influencing subsistence strategies more generally in Colombian Amazonia. Colombia is one of the most diverse countries in the world, in terms of both cultural diversity and biological diversity, and most of the indigenous groups left in the country are located in the Amazon region. The researcher will collect information on Tikuna views of the environment and their changing relationship to it through semi-structured interviews, oral histories, focus groups, the elicitation of ecological calendars, and resource walks to map changing land use patterns and perceptions of environmental changes. These data will be compared to patterns of rainfall and temperature taken by the Colombian government over the last 40 years as well as parallel data collected by the researcher during the field year. The result will be a tropical case study that documents local-level environmental effects of global climate change, both culturally and materially, as well as associated shifts in livelihood and other practices. This research is important because it will contribute to theorizing the relationship between perceptions of climate change and climate-change induced shifts in livelihoods. As such, findings also have the potential to contribute to the literatures on the complex adaptive human systems and historical ecology, and to the development of culturally effective conservation and development practices. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.