The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) promises a combination of topdown, bottomup, and cross scale geographical assessments that embraces widely diverging knowledge systems and methodologies while building stakeholder capacity through subglobal regional discussion and scenarios. In contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is mostly topdown and peer-reviewed by scientists using a standard, inflexible methodology. The MA is potentially more of a social process and represents an evolution of ecological assessments from just product to engaging stakeholders. Local stakeholder legitimacy requires more than limited published scientific information when better knowledge is available locally. Validity and accuracy are enhanced by relevance, utility, and ownership. But, despite its theoretical promise of flexibility, the MA has funded little to date for local and Indigenous communities.

Results/Conclusions

As a result, a new global Indigenous organization was formed in 2008: the Indigenous Climate Change Assessment (IPCCA) that will empower local communities to use their Traditional Knowledge (TK) in order to make their own assessments of present and anticipated climate change impacts. Rather than wait for the MA or IPCC to reach out to them, the IPCCA will gather local case study knowledge that could in time be complementary to the IPCC. Simply put, Indigenous cultures describe the natural world in very different ways than Western science and usually possess better-informed Local Knowledge. IPCCA hopes for future scenarios where, as in the MA approach, local Native participants will sit down with Western scientists as equals, balancing complementary and equally valid epistemologies in finding ways to address climate change. Indigenous Knowledge holders are not playing on a level playing field. Western scientists hold the real power in the IPCC and MA, not local stakeholders. Knowledge is power. The IPCCA hopes to level the playing field by asserting the equality of Traditional Knowledge with Western science and speak with equal authority.