Climate Witness

Climate Witness is a global project that works to capture indigenous knowledge regarding climate change. The project is far reaching as WWF’s work with local communities from the Inuit of Canada, the Sherpas of the Himalayas, the mangrove island dwellers of the Sunderbans in India, the Pampas communities in Argentina as well as isolated Pacific Island communities like Kabara in Fiji, which was the first Climate Witness site in the Pacific.

Giving climate change a voice 

By collecting and documenting stories from these communities, WWF not only attempts to highlight the multifarious impacts climate change has and on these communities but to draw out and enhance the human face of the whole climate change phenomenon. By doing so, Climate Witness aims to bring a new angle to the climate change debate on the global platform, and help get developed nations such as the United States and Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

A further overarching purpose of Climate Witness is to raise climate change awareness within these communities in order to empower them to take action to increase their resilience to its adverse impacts.

The video follows Penina Moce and her family from Udu, Kabara. She tells her story of how it is becoming increasingly difficult to catch fish and grow food as the reef systems are dying and there are drought periods and saltwater intrusion. The adaptation techniques mentioned in the video were implimented by WWF and have included installing rainwater tanks, moving houses and infrastructure away from the shore, and planting trees to stabilise the shore from erosion.