"Expanding Tibetan Studies: Indigenous Knowledge & Climate Change"
In December 2023, the Henry Luce Foundation awarded Columbia University a five-year grant to support the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute in facilitating a global platform for exchange among practitioners, scientists, and scholars.
The grant project entitled "Expanding Tibetan Studies: Indigenous Knowledge & Climate Change Research" will launch on July 1, 2024 and leverage MTSP's previous work with the Climate School/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and with other universities in North America, as well as researchers in the Himalayas and in China. Above all, the project will engage community leaders from the Tibetan Plateau and broader Himalayan Region who have studied and practiced indigenous ways of mitigating the impacts of climate change and building paths to resilience.
Since 2019, the MTSP has hosted in-person and online panels featuring climate-change experts from around the world; proceedings of these events can be viewed in the MTSP Video Library. Building on these exchanges, Professor Gray Tuttle, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, offered a new course, "The Third Pole: A Climate History of the Tibetan Plateau," with Dr. Hung Nguyen, a hydrologist and dendrologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in spring 2023. Konchok Gelek (WEAI postdoctoral scholar) is now teaching a succeeding seminar: "Climate Change: The Tibetan Plateau as a Case Study" (Spring 2024).
Indigenous Knowledge & Climate Change Research
The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) where the rate of climate change today is among the most dramatic on earth, is regarded as the "Third Pole" for its longstanding glaciers and the headwaters of eight major rivers sourcing the lowland areas in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. While spatial distributions of nomadic peoples have always been linked and subject to hydroclimatic variability worldwide, the current impacts on the livelihoods of people living on the Plateau and the surrounding Himalayan regions to the south are particularly acute.
As massive stretches of permafrost thaw with alarming rapidity across the Plateau, Tibetan and Tibeto-Mongolian nomads (who until this century accounted for nearly 80% of traditional economic activity) are now driven to utilize grazing pastures in new ways, or to abandoning this form of livelihood altogether. While the climatic conditions may vary, similar phenomena in human geography are occurring around the world and raising parallel questions and challenges.
Official polices, including fencing and sedentarization, are variously implemented across the QTP, even as a return to traditional practices is also being explored. The issues facing herders and farmers on the Tibetan Plateau share similarities with local populations across the Himalayan region, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and elsewhere in northern India. The project will engage with contemporary herders, researchers, and local leaders who are working to identify the underlying causes and implications of the unprecedented climate change they face today, and to revive or find new adaptive strategies for long-term sustainability. The project can also serve to help identify best practices in local communities.
Conversations and the sharing of data which could help forge pathways to resilience are often siloed -- whether due to national borders and varying agendas, the disciplinary and regional studies boundaries that exist in university settings, the frequent divide between researchers and field-practitioners, and unequal access to resources, data and other information that could support solutions. The Luce project, including an international conference on "Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change in Tibetan and Himalayan Regions" in April 2026, and related follow-up, seeks to redress this missed opportunity.
MTSP will work with a core team to communicate the results of these exchanges and model projects through public programming and publications (including platforms in Asia), to create datasets and other resources/tools for ongoing study and local application, and to assist in forging a transnational network of researchers and practitioners.
We invite anyone interested in joining our efforts to contact us: [email protected].
We are honored and deeply grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for its recognition and for renewing the cornerstone support it first granted the Modern Tibetan Studies Program twenty years ago. Our aim is to bring Tibetan Studies into conversation and a working partnership with researchers and practitioners, at universities and beyond. The Luce Foundation grant allows us to do exactly that -- and around an issue of critical importance and global concern.
This project is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
