Involving Indigenous Community in Policy Making

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Involving Indigenous Community in Policy Making
The climate has been changing to the worst in the past few years. This change is expected to continue bringing with it diverse environmental issues including; sea level rise, heat waves, drought, desertification, flash floods and also global warming. However, many governments and international organization like the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), a section of the United Nations are working day and night to address this issue. Nevertheless, these players have been ignoring the most critical stakeholder in this war, the indigenous communities. Even though the policymakers are bringing in solutions, these indigenous communities have always had their way of coping and adapting to climate change (Hesed and Michael 2). Therefore, the policymakers should always involve and include them in all the processes of addressing climate change.
In Bay Watershed, the policymakers should and must engage the local communities and their indigenous ways of coping with climate change because they are ones who understand and feel the brutal consequences of climate change. To do this, the local people from Bay Watershed should at all stages of the process be able to give their consent before any project geared towards climate change is implemented. Thus, they should be given a chance to participate in the formulation process. Secondly, the people from the Bay Watershed area should be given an opportunity to select their representatives; these should be people who understand them and their issues.

The third way of including this community is by incorporating their knowledge by allowing them to play an active role in the projects as well as using their traditional expertise in such projects. In addition to this, better involve the people of Bay Watershed, the policymakers should ensure that they are trustworthy, respectful, equity and empower the locals at all process (Hesed and Michael 3). This will then build a proper basis for interaction and cooperation.

Work Cited
Hesed, Christine D. Miller, and Michael Paolisso. “Cultural knowledge and local vulnerability in African American communities.” Nature Climate Change 5.7 (2015): 683.