Climate change as cultural erosion: Indigenous knowledge loss and systemic adaptation gaps in South Asia
Original framing: “Q&A: Climate change is also a cultural crisis” — bing news
Women in indigenous communities—often the primary knowledge holders—are systematically excluded from climate policy forums like COP, despite their disproportionate burden from climate impacts. Dalit and Janajati groups in Nepal face double discrimination: as indigenous peoples and as lower-caste communities, their solutions are dismissed as 'backward.' Global climate funds (e.g., Green Climate Fund) allocate <5% to indigenous-led projects.
The crisis in Kathmandu is not merely about melting glaciers or erratic monsoons—it is a rupture in the cultural fabric that has sustained Himalayan communities for millennia.
Colonial land grabs, state-led conservation, and the hegemony of Western science have systematically dismantled indigenous knowledge systems, turning climate change into a double crisis: ecological and epistemological. Yet, the solutions lie in reversing this hierarchy—through legal pluralism, indigenous-led funding, and cross-cultural diplomacy that treats TEK as equal to Western science. Actors like the *Rai* Forest Parliament or the *Tamang* Sky Watchers demonstrate that resilience is not a product of techno-fixes but of relational wisdom. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that the most absurd failure is a system that funds 'climate solutions' while outlawing the very practices that built them. The path forward requires dismantling the colonial gaze in climate policy and centering those who have stewarded this land long before the term 'climate change' existed.