**2. Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction, Indigenous Resilience**

Recent discussions of climate change assume that there is a need for adaptation. This was not so until fairly recently. Under the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the policy focus on climate change was mitigation, with the idea that climate change could be reduced in severity by such measures as reducing greenhouse gases. Adaptation was not widely discussed, and considered an undesirable policy focus in that it might undermine mitigation. Only after about 2010, after it became

**Citation:** Berkes, F.; Tsai, H.-M.; Bayrak, M.M.; Lin, Y.-R. Indigenous Resilience to Disasters in Taiwan and Beyond. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 2435. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052435

Received: 18 February 2021 Accepted: 19 February 2021 Published: 24 February 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

clear that mitigation was not working, and the Kyoto Protocol formally expired in 2012, the concept of adaptation came into the foreground.

Thus, we are past the point of preventing climate change, so it is time to adapt. This requires being ready to respond to events that occur occasionally and unpredictably, such as typhoons. Unpredictable events, by their very nature, pose a difficult problem for governance. Some measures are possible, such as earthquake-proof building codes. However, it cannot be known beforehand when and where a typhoon might strike or its magnitude. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to typhoon-proof an entire island such as Taiwan.

We are in an unusual new era in which human activities have started to cause major changes in the earth's ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles—we are in the Anthropocene [1]. According to the last two IPCC reports, climate change very likely means a statistical increase in the frequency and strength of typhoons in the Pacific and hurricanes in the Atlantic [2]. However, typhoons are not the only consequence of climate change, and climate change is not the only kind of global environmental change. Rapid global environmental change requires governance for disaster risk reduction (DRR), and new and creative responses to maintain flexible policy options in the face of unpredictable disaster events.

With more frequent and more intense disasters, DRR evolved as an approach generally adopted by disaster risk management professionals to make "our communities safer and more resilient to disasters" (p. 1) [3]. DRR is generally aimed at identifying, assessing and reducing the causal and/or underlying risk factors of environmental disasters [4]. Indigenous communities hold a unique position in DRR discourse in that they are often thought to be more vulnerable than non-Indigenous groups. Yet they also hold local and traditional knowledge that enables an understanding of hazards and disasters, and confers adaptive capacity [5,6].

To explore what we can learn from local and traditional knowledge, we discuss the concept of resilience and its significance for environmental change in the context of risks and hazards. Resilience is the ability to deal with change successfully [7]. Since 2010 or so, resilience has become a central concept in sustainability science because it is probably the most commonly used theory of change in social-ecological systems, that is, the integrated system of people and environment considered together. Resilience may be formally defined as the "capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks" [8]. It is the capacity of a system (such as a community together with the land and resources on which it depends) to deal with disturbances, such as floods and typhoons, so as to retain its essential structures and functions. Resilient systems have the ability to absorb shocks and stresses, to self-organize, and to learn and adapt.

A resilient social-ecological system may have a high diversity of landscapes, native species, and crop species and varieties, as well as a diversity of economic opportunities and livelihood options for its inhabitants [9]. The knowledge and understanding behind such diversity and options provide a built-in ability to buffer change and/or to adapt to change [10]. Peoples' knowledge of their environment is an important consideration in buffering or adapting to change. For example, Indigenous knowledge can supplement science by providing grounded information and understanding of the actual impacts of climate change and adaptation possibilities [11].

Resilience is important for dealing with disaster-shocks for three reasons. First, resilience as a theory or organizing framework is interdisciplinary and avoids the artificial disciplinary divide between the study of people and the study of the biophysical environment. It helps evaluate hazards holistically when the integrated social-ecological system is used as the unit of analysis. For example, if a typhoon results in a landslide in an area used by an Indigenous community, the unit of analysis is the Indigenous community together with its land and resource base, including the area that has suffered the landslide. It is not only the people in the community, nor is it only the land.

Second, resilience puts the emphasis on the ability of the system to deal with a disaster-shock. There are multiple ways in which a response may occur. A relatively small disturbance typically triggers short-term or coping responses. However, if the coping capacity is exceeded, then there are incremental changes—an adaptive response. If both coping and adapting capacities are exceeded, the response is no longer incremental but transformative, such as in a resettlement situation following a typhoon. The system no longer retains its identity; in this case, it has been transformed from a rural to an urban social-ecological system. Absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity may be considered as the three components of social-ecological resilience [7].

Third, resilience is forward-looking and helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and change. Because it deals with the dynamics of response, resilience helps explore policy options for dealing with future uncertainty and change. Resilience-building is an effective way to deal with social-ecological change characterized by future surprises and unknowable risks. It can be accomplished by actively developing and engaging the capacity to deal with change, for example, by improving social learning from past disastershocks and looking for "windows of opportunity" to affect policy change [9]. Resilience provides a way for thinking about policies for the future, an important consideration in a world characterized by rapid change.

The concept of resilience to disasters takes on special importance in an era of rapid change. One of the ideas explored in the Taipei December 2019 conference was the promising approach of building resilience based on Indigenous and local knowledge [12]. However, much of the IPCC literature makes little mention of Indigenous peoples, much less Indigenous knowledge. Salick and Ross [13] commented that the IPCC [14] treated Indigenous peoples only as helpless victims of environmental change that is beyond their control. This view of Indigenous peoples as passive victims is not consistent with the experience. For example, in the Canadian Arctic, the Inuit were adapting to climate change as early as the late 1990s [15]. Much has been documented since then throughout the world on local responses to climate change [11]. However, Indigenous and local knowledge seem to be still undervalued and largely unrecognized by the IPCC [16].

What is the source of Indigenous resilience, and how do Indigenous peoples do it? It is largely a question of survival. Left to their own devices, Indigenous and local rural peoples have developed the knowledge and experience to deal with disaster-shocks. We use this term to refer to unexpected and catastrophic impacts stemming from nature-triggered extreme environmental events, such as earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, cyclones, and floods. Disaster-shocks are typically extreme events that surpass the usual technological, socioeconomic and cultural thresholds [17,18]. Typically, they are events that oral cultures are well equipped to remember.

Thus, the use of social memory is one of the ways in which Indigenous peoples deal with these disaster-shocks. Indigenous and local rural peoples retain a memory of once-in-a-generation events and often develop protocols to deal with them. Some of these protocols were described as early as the 1930s in some Pacific islands by the anthropologist Raymond Firth [19]. Thus, a major mechanism to develop local responses to disasters seems to be social learning: the deliberation of individuals and groups to share experiences for collaborative problem-solving [20,21].

Building resilience based on Indigenous knowledge, social memory and social learning is still only a part of the story. Ford et al. [6] reviewed Indigenous resilience to environmental change, and emphasized the importance of the interconnected roles of place, agency, institutions, and collective action, in addition to Indigenous knowledge and learning. In this Special Issue, we explore Indigenous resilience: the ways in which local and cultural factors, along with the broader political ecology, determine how Indigenous people understand, cope with and adapt to climate change related events and other disaster-shocks.
