The Program

Background

IPON brings together researchers, Indigenous communities, and decision-makers who have been collaborating on environmental change related projects in the global south and north for over a decade. Through this work, we have created networks of trust and reciprocity, strengthened our capacity to conduct applied research, and developed a baseline understanding of the key risks posed by climate change and health emergencies to Indigenous communities.

During the pandemic we started to collaborate, reflecting the urgent need to pool resources, understanding, and best practices to inform efforts to reduce pandemic risk and build resilience. With support from UKRIs GCRF-Newton program, FAO, and the WHO, we established the COVID-Observatories research program. A key part of this collaboration involved harnessing local research capacity and Indigenous knowledge to develop a real-time understanding of the lived experiences of COVID-19 and networking communities to decision-making processes at regional to global scales. In March 2023, in our first in-person meeting hosted at Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri, India, we collectively decided to transform our network into IPON to respond to global emergencies.

Many of us have been working together since 2010 in the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change Program.

Vision

Our vision is to transform and rethink how we understand the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up, building on multiple ways of knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledge and science, including Indigenous cosmogonies, and in ways that strengthen community resilience to multiple stresses and support actions that benefit Indigenous peoples. We want to promote a people-focused approach that encourages learning from each other and learning together.

Mission

To achieve this vision, we will develop, operationalize, and maintain Indigenous Observatories that are composed of community leaders, elders, youth, decision-makers, and researchers among Indigenous communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Fiji, Ghana, India, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Namibia, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda, USA, and the UK. The Observatory architecture provides the basis for achieving Research, Training, and Impact goals, the establishment of which will be guided by Indigenous conceptualizations and One Health approaches.

Research Design

As a network we recognize

1

The health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples globally face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation, compounding high levels of poverty, disease pandemics e.g., the legacy of COVID-19, discrimination, land dispossession, and colonization.

2

It is primarily through the nexus with Indigenous food systems that these stresses converge and interact to affect health and well-being.

3

Indigenous knowledge and practices underpin resilience across the food-climate-health nexus but are being overlooked and undermined by government policy. and

4

New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision-making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses.

Observatory Approach

IPON is structured around a network-based model that is designed to leverage and strengthen capacity in partner regions, minimize travel, enhance shared learning, and ground the research within the specific cultures and contexts of Indigenous communities. Within each region we have established Indigenous Observatories, composed of:

Community observers including local leaders, elders, and youth in the study regions, who act as key informants and diary keepers.
Policy Observers including representatives of local and regional health authorities, indigenous organizations, and health practitioners, who will document govermeent responses to climate change and emergencies with respect to Indigenous Peoples.
And In-country Researchers who are CO-Is and collaborators on IPON and coordinate and manage the Observatories each region.

Goals

Our research goals are to use the Observatories to document, monitor, and examine the lived experiences, stories, responses, and observations of how climate stressors interact with food systems, health, and well-being across partner regions and communities as they play out on a real-time basis across seasons. This will allow us to tease apart the complexity of factors and drivers affecting community resilience and vulnerability and how they differ between and within communities, across seasons, and over time, rooted in the worldviews and cultures of our Observers.
Our impact goals focus on co-generating knowledge and capacity to inform policy development and catalyze actions that build on community strengths and address potential vulnerabilities. This includes supporting pilot programs within communities and incorporating mechanisms to ensure they continue. The Observatories provide a vehicle for strengthening the capacity of communities to document their own knowledge on the links between climate, food, and health, and a space to dialogue with decision-makers at regional, national, and global levels on what actions are needed to build resilience. The global scope of the Observatories provides a grounding for developing scalable insights for informing decision-making and advocacy of our partners within the UN and Indigenous organizations.
Our training goals focus on innovation, leadership, and research excellence, emphasizing the importance of finding solutions and learning from multiple ways of knowing. Consistent with diverse Indigenous worldviews, we view training holistically as developing skills within the larger context of cultural values, laws, and belief systems, which help maintain harmony and balance in understanding and responding to change. We will build expertise, competency, skills, and networks for understanding and responding to change; invest in cross-cultural transdisciplinary training, mentorship, and co-learning; foster cross-cultural dialogue for responding to climate impacts; and establish networks for global impact and cross-cultural learning.