Local knowledge in climate related natural hazards

The topic of local knowledge has received increased attention in recent years in relation to societal resilience and climate adaptation. The importance of raising the status and increase the adoption of local knowledge in risk governance can be argued for from both normative and theoretical positions, as it relates both to political/democratic expectations and scientific recommendations. Local knowledge, however, is not easy to capture. It comes in many forms and can be understood in many ways. Different scientific traditions and fields approach local knowledge from different angles, and with different purposes. In this paper, we discuss how local knowledge is addressed in the field of safety, and how it is addressed in other research fields like participatory research, anthropology and science and technology studies - and we discuss this in the context of climate adaptation. Being fully aware that the different fields partly overlap in their treatment of a particular topic like local knowledge, the idea is not as much to point to differences as to explore how safety research draws, and potentially can draw further, on insights and perspectives from adjacent research fields, offering e.g. methods and epistemologies useful for safety science. The paper adopts a research on risk approach to local knowledge, implying that we undertake our investigations on the intersection between the field of safety and other, adjacent research fields. The paper is developed as part of a research project on climate adaptation and natural hazards in Arctic environments.

Keywords: local knowledge, climate change, natural hazards.