Fire and Water: Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Climate Challenges in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

ABSTRACT

Recently, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) has become the center of worldwide attention due to large-scale fires that engulfed the tundra in 2020 and the taiga in 2021. Unprecedented forest fires caused enormous economic and environmental damage and left an indisputable mark on the republic’s society, which rallied in the face of fire danger. Along with fires, the Indigenous people of the North also must cope with and adapt to other natural disasters, including floods.

As natural disasters become more frequent and extensive, humanity faces acute questions concerning successful adaptation to climate change’s negative impacts. Studying the experience of the Indigenous population can help provide answers. They are the first to bear the brunt of climate change, given their traditional land management, and they are the first to solve the problems of adaptation to changing conditions. The article discusses preventive measures and ways of adaptation of the Indigenous peoples of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to forest fires and floods. Environmental lessons learned from past disasters are analyzed, drawing on Indigenous knowledge and science, to prevent their recurrence.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Indigenous
• ecological knowledge
• natural disasters
• fire
• flood
• adaptation strategies
• Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

Notes

1. Vera Solovyeva’s doctoral research was funded with a U.S. National Science Foundation grant. It resulted in her 2021 PhD thesis “Climate Change in Oymyakon: Perceptions, Responses and How Local Knowledge May Inform Policy.”

2. This was part of the HYPE-ERAS project, funded by FORMAS (DNR: 2019-02332), an RFBR (project No. 20-55-71005) and a JST (grant No. JPMJBF2003) within the framework of the Belmont Forum joint research program: “Resilience in a Rapidly Changing Arctic.”

3. Some of these field trips were funded through the RFFI project No. 12-06-28505 “Anthropology of the rural cultural landscape: evolving human and natural interrelations in the North.”

4. The fallout among the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) public forced Kuksin to apologize for his words.

a. Provisional results of the 2021 census have been dribbling out in 2022. For the Sakha republic, a suspiciously low total is 996,000 (just under 1 million), with 665,000 urban and 331,000 rural (a slight rise in the urban population compared to 2010). Full ethnic proportions have not yet been published, but the slight majority 52.9% of Indigenous suggested here may well be higher. The proportion of Sakha in the 2010 census was probably under-reported, since they officially came in at a remarkable 48.7% (just under one half). The important point made here, pertaining to both 2010 and 2021 data, is that according to UN definitions, Indigenous peoples include those continuously living in homelands within a larger state. Russia’s laws concerning Indigenous groups focus on the “small-numbered” ethnonational peoples, often termed “minorities” regardless of their local demographic proportions. These are defined as having a population under 50,000. Russian law thus specifically and purposefully leaves out non-Russian groups with their own republics, such as the Sakha.

b. The discrepancies among the regions concerning how much value is attributed to land in fire emergencies probably concerns calculations about the discrepant sizes of the regions and republics. It may also involve specific lobbying of regional authorities with various relevant administrations and ministries in Moscow. This then becomes an instructive example of asymmetrical federalism in action, especially in the post-Soviet period, but with Soviet legacies.