Local Observations of Climate Change and Impacts on Livelihoods in Kamchatka, Russia

• Main Authors: Sharakhmatova, Victoria N., Gerkey, Drew
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: UNI ScholarWorks 2023
• Subjects: Environment and Sustainability; Social Sciences; Climate change; Kamchatka; Kamchatka Peninsula; Siberia
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/6047; https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003356837; https://scholarworks.uni.edu/context/facpub/article/7050/viewcontent/2023_Sharakhmatova_ClimateChangeRussia.pdf

Indigenous communities throughout the Arctic are confronting unprecedented challenges arising from anthropogenic climate change. The inextricable connections between their livelihoods and social and environmental systems, combined with a rich foundation of individual and inter-generational collective experience and knowledge, make Indigenous communities particularly adept at observing changes in climate and understanding their impacts. In this chapter, we apply the protocol from the Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts project to document observations and impacts of climate change in Khailino, an Indigenous community on the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Northeast Siberia, Russia. We use individual interviews to identify what changes are occurring, then use focus groups to assess consensus about those changes, their impacts, and the strategies people are using to adapt. We focus on (1) increasing winter temperatures, (2) decreases in the amount and quality of snow, (3) increases in winter rainfall, and (4) changes in the timing of fall freeze-up and spring break-up of river ice. These changes negatively impact people’s livelihoods in many ways, including disruptions to transportation and traditional subsistence activities. Our analysis connects these observations and impacts of climate change to forms of cultural, economic, and political change in the post-Soviet era.