When climate change affects intangible cultural heritage

A ‘White Christmas’ in Norway, truffle gathering in Italy’s Piedmont region, flying fish in Barbados, nomadic herding in Mongolia’s Altai mountains, a Shinto ritual on the frozen surface of a Japanese lake, and Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier. What do these have in common? They are cultural references that have been altered by climate change.

Daniel Puig, a researcher at the University of Bergen’s Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, studies how climate change affects intangible cultural heritage. 

«Intangible cultural heritage matters: in addition to providing income and helping maintain community cohesion, heritage is important in its own right, because humans are cultural beings. This is especially evident among indigenous peoples, marginalised groups, displaced communities, and those living in icy or polar regions, who are among the most affected», Daniel says.

Changes That Affect the Essence of the Human Condition

Adaptation is what we do to adjust to the impacts of climate change. However, adaptation has limits. Daniel Puig is researching how social constraints increase or reduce our ability to adapt to a changing climate, and what consequences this has for intangible cultural heritage.

«Limits to climate change adaptation can be biophysical – like higher ambient temperatures driving glacier retreat. However, very often limits to adaptation are socially constructed – in the choices individuals make, based on their own more or less subjective preferences, and in the decisions institutions make, based on politically-defined priorities or simply inertia. For example, individual values, such as feeling attached to a place, social norms - such as certain traditions -and psychosocial preferences - such as aversion to risk - matter a lot when it comes to whether adaptation works or not for people at the individual level», Daniel says.

«This is because there are ‘things’ that we find indispensable to our physical and emotional wellbeing – people, animals and plants, objects, places, experiences, and opportunities. Intangible cultural heritage, which includes traditional festivities and crafts, knowledge about nature, cultural landscapes, and language, is one of these ‘things’: it provides references that help us find our place in an increasingly complex and tough world», Daniel says.

Intangible cultural heritage has both instrumental value – for example, in the form of tourism income – and intrinsic value – through its contribution to securing cultural continuity, enhancing aesthetic appreciation, and fostering spiritual fulfilment, Daniel explains.

«The instrumental value is of course important, but it should not overshadow the significance of the intrinsic values, because they represent unique and incommensurable aspects of the human condition», he says.

Wellbeing

Before obtaining his PhD, Daniel Puig had a long career outside of academia. He now works at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, an interdisciplinary research hub at the University of Bergen.

«I started working on climate policy early in my career», Daniel says.

This focus led him to pay increasing attention to the kinds of issues studied in human geography.

«Early on, my work incorporated social science aspect – human geography perspectives in particular – because of the importance these sorts of issues have in the effectiveness of policies», he says.

There is research showing that intangible cultural heritage contributes to wellbeing; the same research shows that the loss of intangible cultural heritage decreases people’s wellbeing. No adaptation policy will work in such a situation.

Daniel says that climate change is but one of many threats to cultural diversity.

«Globalization is also a big threat, along with conflict and poverty. Climate change makes the other threats worse. For example, where there is conflict and then a drought, the drought only worsens the consequences of the conflict. Climate is both a threat and an accelerator of all the other threats, » he says.

Climate Injustice

Asked about what drives him, Daniel says:

«I suppose there is an activist in me. Climate change is, at its core, a profound injustice: there is no correspondence between those who cause the problem and those who suffer the consequences. It is bad enough when the injustice takes away your livelihood, but in some sense, it is even worse when it also takes away your culture. The activist in me finds this deeply upsetting. »

Daniel adds that the way we deal intangible cultural heritage affected by climate change hides a more subtle injustice. He describes a religious ceremony in Japan – a tradition that goes back centuries and involves the frozen surface of a lake – except that, these days, the lake seldom freezes, and thus the tradition is likely to wane.

Because not everyone in the region feels strongly about the loss of this tradition, and those who do are neither the most influential nor the most vocal, its loss does not receive much attention or recognition. As a result, those who feel distressed about the loss are on their own to articulate some kind of response to it.

This is unjust:

«How many people does it take for the loss of heritage to matter, and who gets to decide about that? » Daniel asks.

Consciously or not, culture mediates our every actions. As Daniel Puig puts it:

«When you lose your cultural references, you are inflicted a type of poverty that often is irreversible, which is why studying these issues is important. »