People who live in places hit hardest by climate change, such as small islands, high mountains and the Arctic, and who make their living directly from land and sea, see environmental change before others do. Their heightened exposure turns them into early observers, already tracking and responding to shifts that outsiders are only beginning to measure.
Because communities living off natural resources watch their surroundings closely and constantly, what they know is a source of information for assessing climate change, not just a cultural curiosity. Their observations can sit alongside scientific measurement as evidence about how the environment is changing.
Knowledge handed down through generations is not frozen tradition; communities build on it to invent their own responses to a climate that is changing fast. Local solutions developed this way may also prove useful far beyond the places where they arose.