Promoting Blue Resilience: Knowledge Systems Integration, Maritime Heritage, and Culture-based Climate Action in Coastal Communities

The significant role that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and cultural maritime heritage (CMH) can play in coastal communities’ adaptation to climate change and ocean governance has received increased attention in recent years. ILK often encompasses a sophisticated understanding of the marine and coastal environment, its ecosystems, the impact of human activity, and the cultural significance associated with specific landscapes and seascapes.  Based on this understanding, ILK holders have developed sustainable ways of managing marine and coastal resources and spaces, which have proven to be effective in safeguarding the ecological balance of their traditional land-ocean interfaces while adapting to a changing climate. Similarly, both tangible and intangible maritime heritage frame human interaction with coastal and marine environments and represent an invaluable resource to help coastal communities strengthen their adaptive capacity and inform their role as wise stewards of our ocean planet. Recognizing and incorporating ILK and CMH into marine spatial planning and climate adaptation can thus significantly enhance their effectiveness and ensure a balance between climate action, conservation goals, economic activities, and cultural preservation for a resilient ocean. Nevertheless, despite increasing interest in knowledge integration for ocean governance and coastal climate adaptation, efforts to do so remain fragmented and insufficient in practice. Power imbalances may perpetuate dominant forms of knowledge over others and obstruct efforts at knowledge co-production. Drawing on cross-disciplinary field research on coastal communities across the world, this presentation offers co-generated insights regarding knowledge systems integration into climate adaptation strategies that can protect coastal communities against increasing climate-driven risks while preserving their marine ecosystems and their natural and cultural heritage. I advocate a social learning (SL) approach understood as the joint and collaborative learning that occurs through stakeholders’ interactions in a process of collective discussion and the search for solutions to environmental problems. Evidence from my own and others’ fieldwork strongly suggests that SL is a fruitful approach to knowledge system integration incorporating ILK, CMH and Western science-based knowledge towards the promotion of “blue resilience” in coastal communities.