Harnessing Indigenous Local Knowledge for Disaster Risk Reduction Through Social-Ecological Resilience

Abstract

Global environmental change threatens human society and accelerates land degradation by humans’ excessively and inappropriate use of natural resources. The complexity of the human-environmental system and its cascading effects were highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2022 report, which pointed to the increasing severity of climate change and its risks to society and ecosystems. However, most disaster management policies are focused on constructing hardware prevention engineering, which lacks the concern to reduce rooted disaster risks incubated by harmonious human-land relationships in local contexts. This study uses a Seediq tribal community that faces compound disaster risks, Alang Tongan, as a case study to demonstrate that effective long-term disaster risk reduction begins with cultivating a holistic and respectful relationship between people and the environment. Participant observation and in-depth interviews are used to collect first-hand data and understand the nexus relationships among ecological restoration, cultural revitalization, economic recovery, and disaster risk reduction. Results show that local knowledge-inherent disaster risk reduction strategies enable communities to respond to and learn from environmental dynamics. These strategies foster a resilient social-ecological system and highlight its capacity for reorganizing into a more robust-but-resilient state. This study concludes that social-ecological resiliency is critical for communities facing disaster risks. Therefore, nature-based solutions that integrate local knowledge, agricultural livelihoods, and sustainable land circulation practices can enhance adaptive capacity in response to environmental threats.