More than 370 million indigenous peoples worldwide living in richly biodiverse yet fragile ecosystems—mainly forests and coastal zones—have suffered the impact of climate change. Climate change-induced disasters such as rising sea levels, increased climate variability, frequent droughts, floods, and typhoons affect indigenous peoples’ foodways.

Foodways refer to a complex food system of production, processing, distribution, and consumption particular to a specific geographic region. Changing foodways has a detrimental impact on the health of indigenous peoples and threatens their survival.

The Problem

The damaging impact of climate change on indigenous foodways has coincided with mounting international attention on global food insecurity and resource scarcity, provoking the expansion of land control and the renewal of interest in resource extraction. The rapidly increasing conversion of land, forest, and coastal areas into non-food production threatens the very existence of indigenous foodways, generating mundane precarity and plunging indigenous people into a perpetual state of insecurity.

Research Gap

While international agencies recognise the links between climate change, food security, and development programming, existing research on the effects of climate change on indigenous foodways remains dominated by narrow, metric-based, and technocratic approaches. These approaches reveal little about the complexity of food availability, power relations, and the symbolic dimensions of food in specific places.

Research Approach

This project fills this critical gap through an intimately investigative ethnography of how climate change affects indigenous foodways. It investigates the contingencies and complexity of food insecurity experienced by indigenous peoples — exploring how ecological crises lead to the depletion of food resources, transform relations between people and their food sources, and manifest in material, sensory, and symbolic ways.

By combining food anthropology with environmental humanities and political ecology, the project complements quantitative metrics with rich, grounded stories, knowledge, practices, and experiences of indigenous communities.