**1. Introduction**

The world is undergoing rapid environmental change. Different perspectives must be used to understand change and to respond to environmental disasters brought about by climate change and other driving forces. Many national and international agencies have been exploring the use of Indigenous and local knowledge as a source of resilience and adaptation in the face of rapid change. This Special Issue is a follow-up to a conference organized in Taipei in December 2019 to explore two interrelated themes: "Climate Change and Food Security: Indigenous Knowledge-based Responses and Actions" and "Climate Change and Post-Disaster Resilience in Indigenous Communities–10 Years after Typhoon Morakot". This Special Issue includes selected papers from the Taipei December 2019 conference and contributed papers.

The overall goals of the Special Issue are to (1) discuss the international experience with Indigenous resilience and knowledge systems; (2) bring together what is known about Indigenous and local knowledge for adaptation to climate change and for disaster management, as relevant to Taiwan; and (3) generate a conversation among scholars, Indigenous peoples, and policy-making agencies to move the agenda forward.

This introductory paper starts with two sections on basic concepts and the logic behind them—the state of the art in the international literature. The next section discusses why Taiwan poses unique and interesting problems, and what special issues Taiwan is concerned with. The following section is a review of existing scholarship in Taiwan about these issues and gaps in knowledge. Taiwan is very experienced in disaster risk reduction, disaster management, and post-disaster recovery and re-settlement. Other areas, such as Indigenous resilience (the ways in which cultural factors such as knowledge and learning, along with the broader political ecology, determine how local and Indigenous people understand, deal with and adapt to environmental change), remain to be developed. The penultimate section deals with the policy implications of these findings and the way ahead. Specifically, we discuss the prospects toward adaptive governance using Indigenous knowledge and resilience. The final section introduces the papers in the Special Issue.
