Indigenous Knowledge and Disaster Risk Reduction: Insight Toward Perception, Response, Adaptation and Sustainability

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge system is being recognized as a significant component of disaster mitigation and risk reduction strategy of the twenty-first century. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Management, while seeking to advance risk reduction strategies for bringing resilience in the community, tends to promote indigenous knowledge in disaster risk management configuring it within their policy and programs for achieving the goals of sustainable development. These indigenous knowledge systems are also being promoted by the UNESCO LINKS program which promotes inclusion of indigenous knowledge in global climate science and policy formulations. LINKS strives to strengthen indigenous people and local communities, foster transdisciplinary engagements with scientists and policy-makers and piloting novel methodologies to further understandings of climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation. Indigenous knowledge was first acknowledged in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC as a basis for developing community-level adaptation and natural resource management in response to the stresses generated due environmental deterioration. But subsequently indigenous knowledge was accepted by IPCC as an alternate approach toward disaster mitigation- and community-based disaster preparedness. This paper aims to assess the usefulness of this alternate knowledge system in disaster risk reduction based on selected desk reviews of previous literatures of best practices. Besides this, the paper attempts to bring an insightful analysis of the inherent linkage between indigenous knowledge, community perception, human response and adaptation so that it can be a part of an innovative strategy in sustainable disaster risk reduction.