Roman law is often considered as an intellectual matrix of contemporary laws and in particular French civil law. However, even if the vocabulary persisted, some legal concepts went through great changes across history as law was step by step related to a subject’s power. The notion of ‘thing’ originally meant the trial, the case, the litigious situation managed by the legal process. In this way, the thing was understood as a res iuris. In contemporary law systems, the thing (res as a legal category) ordinarily specifies some goods on which the subject applies his property power. This view is understandable considering the evolution due to the theorisation of subjective law which led to the promotion of a strong and exclusive separation between persons and things, while Roman law could imbricate these legal categories. This difficulty is at the heart of the problem when jurists aim to categorise Nature in legal taxonomy.

We are at war with life. The Earth ecosystem, our common home, is being destroyed by industrial technologies which have led to massive pollution of all ecosystems, greenhouse effect, deforestation, impoverishment of the soil, overexploitation of fresh water, acidification of the ocean. We are now engaged in a sixth mass extinction. It is time to recognise the ongoing ecocide, the destruction of our common home, as a crime. It is also time to relearn to live in harmony with Nature, to recognise its intrinsic value and its right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, in all its life forms. The Rights of Nature allow us to protect the rights of future generations, human and non-human. This chapter presents various new initiatives and legal cases from around the world to that end.

At a meeting in Alaska in 2000, when several indigenous speakers shared stories about the rapidly shifting climate, sea ice, and weather in their home areas. I was amazed by how thoroughly they analysed signals of change and how nuanced their observations were, compared to the crude models of prehistoric climate change available in the literature. For many people living in the more temperate mid-latitude areas, ‘climate change’ is about heat and warming. Not so in the Arctic, where the best summary of climate change is that “it’s not cold enough” (Krupnik et al. 2010c). Indigenous people in the North, particularly those living on the seacoast, depend on long cold winter to build solid offshore ice. They monitor the ice for six to ten months every year; they travel on ice, and hunt from it to catch the animals that sustain their life. The Eskimo explanation “it’s not cold enough” has perfect sense from the principles of sea ice geophysics. It requires long cold days to build solid ice. If the ice is weak and broken, comes late or leaves early, more heat is absorbed into the ocean producing thinner and weaker ice next winter. This is a synopsis of what scientists call ‘Arctic amplification’. Over the past 40 years of satellite observations, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically – in its seasonal extent, overall volume, age, and duration. In the northern Bering Sea, sea ice distribution in winter has changed, in professional terms, from a predictable system of icescapes to a mixing bowl of drifting floes. Hunters in many communities report that they have not seen thick bluish multi-year ice of their youth in years. Arctic people have noticed this transformation very early and they have spoken about it loud and clear since the late 1990s. Yet they monitor the ice from their particular vision of users, not as scientists. This paper introduces the study of indigenous sea ice nomenclatures as a path to document, sustain, and ‘co-produce’ local knowledge about ice and Arctic change.

Storytelling among indigenous peoples is central to the intergenerational transmission of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), allowing for human adaptation to new social-ecological contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the potential applications of storytelling in guiding climate change adaptation efforts. In this chapter, we present a number of case studies from all over the world in which indigenous stories and traditional oral narratives have been applied to inform culturally sensitive climate change adaptation strategies. We contend that greater consideration of indigenous ontologies, as transmitted through storytelling, can contribute towards making climate change communication and adaptation more acceptable to local communities, facilitating intercultural discussions and bridging worldviews. Our chapter shows that attention to and promotion of indigenous storytelling can lead to enhanced understanding of diverse values and perceptions around climate change, hence allowing climate change adaptation strategies to become tailored to the local contexts where they are implemented.

The objective of this chapter is to describe the ways in which traditional (ribeirinho) and Indigenous (Cocama) farmers of Central Amazonia are modifying their agricultural and livelihood practices in response to extreme flood events, linked to global climate change, which have occurred over the last ten years. Data were gathered through observation and semi-structured interviews conducted by researchers and technicians of the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development, Brazil. Farmers from upland and floodplain environments agree that large floods are more frequent in the region. Extreme floods have resulted in the disappearance of farmers’ local varieties of manioc and diverse fruit species. Residents also discuss the social consequences of floods, including cyclical migration of families between upland and lowland areas and a deteriorating quality of community life during floods. While our initial results demonstrate farmers’ abilities to adapt in the face of rapid global change, we continue to try to understand the processes of ongoing social, economic and environmental change and the extent and limits of local adaptive capacity.

The author describes the transition from villlage life in the remote outer island of Moce to urban life in Suva, the capital city of Fiji. By passing on the traditions of Indigenous navigation and canoe-building, his family and community members ensure the perpetuation of traditional knowledge among Fiji's younger generations.

The research on the ecological restoration of reindeer lichen pastures described in this chapter relates the dynamic and complex endeavour of different actors through the coproduction of knowledge. First initiated by forest managers and forest ecologists, it soon became transdisciplinary when Sami reindeer herders collaborated, combining science and Indigenous knowledge to solve a problem in which neither were sufficient by themselves. However, the complex challenge of restoring reindeer lichen pastures in productive forest lands required an interdisciplinary and intersubjective understanding of the various partners’ worldviews and knowledge. This was materialized by fostering a collaborative learning process through experimentation, i.e., controlled field experiments that were jointly designed, established and surveyed. The results of these experiments and experiences enabled the exploration of innovative pathways for ecological restoration and to refine and share common goals.

As an Indigenous herder and President of the Association of Traditional Herders of the Sahel, the author describes the difficulties experienced by herders due to the series of severe droughts that they have endured in recent decades due to climatic change. Having suffered huge losses of animals, some have drastically changed their way of life, becoming increasingly nomadic, migrating far beyond traditional teritories or taking up agriculture to help feed their herds.

Assessing potential drivers of and linkages between sea ice retreat or thinning across Arctic Russia and maintenance of the ancient and unique social-ecological systems of the Indigenous reindeer-herding Nenets is a pressing task. Sea ice loss is accelerating in the Barents and Kara Seas in the northwestern region of Arctic Russia. Warming summer air temperatures in recent decades have been linked to more frequent and sustained summer high-pressure systems over West Siberia but not to sea ice retreat. At the same time, autumn/winter rain-on-snow events across the region have become more frequent and intense. Two major rain-on-snow events during November 2006 and 2013 led to massive winter reindeer mortality episodes on Yamal Peninsula, where tundra nomadism remains a vitally important livelihood activity for the indigenous Nenets.

Here we review evidence for autumn atmospheric warming and precipitation increases over Arctic coastal lands in proximity to Barents and Kara sea ice loss. Realizing mutual coexistence of tundra nomadism within the Arctic’s largest natural gas complex under a warming climate will require ready access to and careful interpretation of real-time meteorological and sea-ice data and modelling, as well as meaningful consultation with local communities.

We have entered the era of the Anthropocene. Our rapid transformation of the planet poses a particular threat to socio-ecological systems and the Indigenous peoples who create and sustain them. A strengthened partnership between Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists is required based on decolonized knowledge co-production (DKC). Quite the opposite of scientific extractivism, which selectively exploits local and Indigenous knowledge to its own advantage, and more ambitious than the mere recognition and appraisal of Indigenous knowledge, DKC requires dedicated partners from knowledge systems who have learned through years of collaborative work. This introductory chapter proposes a methodology and ethic for DKC based on a problem-oriented and engaged approach built around mutual trust and benefits, and a profound equity between knowledge systems. It examines the intellectual contributions that laid bare the legacies of colonialism and the hegemony of science, opening the way for DKC: Elinor Ostrom who first coined the term co-production, Bruno Latour and Sheila Jasanoff from science and technology studies, with decisive insights from, among others, Edward Said, Vincent Deloria and Tuhuwai Smith.

As a Sami reindeer herder who subsequently worked with the regional reindeer management administration before running his own business to make tents designed for herders, the author has spent his entire life in Kautokeino, Norway, connected to reindeer herding. He reflects on the social, environmental, institutional and economic changes in reindeer herding that he has observed during his lifetime.

In recent years, reductions in Arctic sea ice extent and thickness have been most pronounced in the Pacific Arctic sector. In addition to major losses of summer ice in the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea ice cover transitioned from above-normal winter ice extent to near complete absence of sea ice in winter in a few years. We highlight observations and findings by Kifikmiut sea-ice experts from the community of Wales in the Bering Strait, Alaska. These observations and the Indigenous knowledge in which they are embedded provide insights into sea-ice change from the perspective of ice users intimately familiar with the cultural landscape of sea ice and its important role in the coastal environment. Our collaborator, the late Winton Weyapuk, Jr., in particular, was instrumental in helping establish a coastal community Indigenous observer network in 2006 during the International Polar Year that radiated out from Wales and continues to grow and thrive. We compare the seasonal sea-ice cycle based on Mr. Weyapuk’s observations for the ice seasons of 2006/07 and 2015/16, illustrating the importance of sea ice for coastal Alaska communities and discussing key aspects of ice-cover demise and its impacts.

Much of climate change policy treats indigenous peoples (if at all) as hapless victims rather than active participants in all components of climate change research, adaptation, mitigation and policy. Most Tibetans are cognizant of recent, rapid Himalayan climate change including rising temperatures, increasing and unpredictable precipitation, glacial retreat, glacial lake formation and outburst, and altering natural resources. Integrating scientific research with Indigenous knowledge leads to innovative perspectives and solutions. Our 1500 km (900 mile) transect across the eastern Himalaya, with intensive, long-term ecological alpine plant monitoring shows rapidly increasing plant richness, biodiversity and endemism, especially at higher elevations. Traditional ecological knowledge and economic policy often prescribe rival adaptations for Himalayan peoples; traditional culture and economics become competing paradigms by which to analyse the impacts of and adaptations to Himalayan climate change. We have even documented the appropriation and monetisation of successful Indigenous adaptations by government and economic entities to the detriment of the same Indigenous people who developed the strategies.