Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-5 (section)

==== 5.3.2.4 Role of cultural values ====

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Food production and consumption are strongly influenced by cultures and beliefs. Culture, values and norms are primary factors in most climate change and food system policies. The benefits of integrating cultural beliefs and ILK into formal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies can add value to the development of sustainable climate change, rich in local aspirations, planned with, and for, local people (Nyong et al. 2007 <sup>[[#fn:r551|551]]</sup> ).

Cultural dimensions are important in understanding how societies establish food production systems and respond to climate change, since they help to explain differences in responses across populations to the same environmental risks (Adger et al. 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r552|552]]</sup> ). There is an inherent adaptability of indigenous people who are particularly connected to land use, developed for many centuries to produce specific solutions to particular climate change challenges. Acknowledging that indigenous cultures across the world are supporting many string strategies and beliefs that offer sustainable systems with pragmatic solutions will help move forward the food and climate sustainability policies. For instance, in the Sahel, the local populations have developed and implemented various adaptation strategies that sustain their resilience despite many threats (Nyong et al. 2007 <sup>[[#fn:r553|553]]</sup> ). There is an increased consideration of local knowledge and cultural values and norms in the design and implementation of modern mitigation and adaptation strategies.

There are some entrenched cultural beliefs and values that may be barriers to climate change adaptation. For instance, culture has been shown to be a major barrier to adaptation for the Fulbe ethnic group of Burkina Faso (Nielsen and Reenberg 2010 <sup>[[#fn:r554|554]]</sup> ). Thus, it is important to understand how beliefs, values, practices and habits interact with the behaviour of individuals and collectivities that have to confront climate change (Heyd and Thomas 2008 <sup>[[#fn:r555|555]]</sup> ). Granderson (2014) <sup>[[#fn:r556|556]]</sup> suggests that making sense of climate change and its responses at the community level demands attention to the cultural and political processes that shape how risk is conceived, prioritised and managed. For a discussion of gender issues related to climate change, see Section 5.2.

Culturally sensitive risk analysis can deliver a better understanding of what climate change means for society (O’Brien and Wolf 2010 <sup>[[#fn:r557|557]]</sup> ; Persson et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r558|558]]</sup> ) and thus, how to better adapt. Murphy et al. (2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1435|1435]]</sup> stated that culture and beliefs play an important role in adaptive capacity but that they are not static. In the work done by Elum et al. (2017) <sup>[[#fn:r559|559]]</sup> in South Africa (about farmers’ perception of climate change), they concluded that perceptions and beliefs often have negative effects on adaptation options.

Culture is a key issue in food systems and the relation of people with nature. Food is an intrinsically cultural process: food production shapes landscapes, which in turn are linked to cultural heritages and identities (Koohafkan and Altieri 2011 <sup>[[#fn:r560|560]]</sup> ; Fuller and Qingwen 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r561|561]]</sup> ), and food consumption has a strong cultural dimension. The loss of subsistence practices in modern cultures and their related ILK, has resulted in a loss of valuable adaptive capacities (Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r562|562]]</sup> ). This is so because these systems are often characterised by livelihood strategies linked to the management of natural resources that have been evolved to reduce overall vulnerability to climate shocks (‘adaptive strategies’) and to manage their impacts ex-post (‘coping strategies’) (Morton 2007 <sup>[[#fn:r563|563]]</sup> ; López-i-Gelats et al. 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r564|564]]</sup> ).

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