The reality of L&D is increasingly being recognized in international climate negotiations, academic discourses, and policymaking. Although mitigation strategies and adaptation efforts are being implemented on various scales and in diverse forms around the world, the devastating impacts of the warming climate are already being experienced by numerous communities. Unfortunately, it is historically marginalized sectors – indigenous peoples, urban and rural poor, and women and youth, among other demographics – who disproportionately incur significant L&D. Acknowledging this dire reality, this blog post investigates the impacts of climate change on indigenous farmers in the municipality of Atok, Benguet, particularly through their lived experiences of losses and damages.
Atok, according to the income classification of the Philippine government, is a third-class municipality situated in Benguet, in the Cordillera Mountain Range in the northern part of the Philippines. It is home to indigenous groups, including the Ibaloi and the Kangkanaey, who utilize traditional farming methods in cultivating their land and harvesting various agricultural produce. These groups traditionally possess rich local knowledge systems about seasonal variations and weather events. They know, for example, that sighting the siyet bird marks the commencement of the dry season, while observing the liboo’s direction (cloud/fog) signals the chances of precipitation.
Indigenous groups like the Ibaloi and the Kangkanaey have also accumulated local knowledge on climate hazards that affect their villages, such as puwek (typhoons), habagat (monsoon rains), andap (frost), and lanti/dalallo (hailstorm). However, traditional practices, which have been passed down through countless generations, have become less adept at accurately predicting and thoroughly understanding the climate amidst an increasingly warming world. This has far-reaching implications not only for the groups’ agricultural production but also on their culture and heritage. Atok has suffered a decline in agricultural productivity due to unpredictable weather and shifting seasons. Additionally, modifications in policies and government priorities have increased tourism and infrastructure development at the expense of supporting traditional farming communities.
Adaptation Amidst Cultural and Ecological Threats: Presenting the research question
As part of the Manila Observatory, we collaborated with the Benguet State University in seeking to synthesize and comprehend the compound effects of climate-induced losses and damages, on the one hand, and developmental, socio-economic, and political complexities, on the other. More specifically, we pose the following question: How do indigenous farmers in Atok adapt to climate-induced challenges while simultaneously preserving their cultural and ecological practices?
Our research creates a climate storyline and historicizes the Atok narrative, aiming to capture a comprehensive understanding of the various factors and nuances that uniquely characterize the lived experiences of climate change in Atok. In the process of constructing the climate storyline, we acknowledge that aspects such as government policies, risk-sharing practices within communities, and local and global economic trends must be explored. So too must the ongoing colonial practices, both explicit and implicit, that attend the discourse.
All of our work is anchored to the notion of climate justice, highlighting how indigenous farmers, despite contributing least to the climate crisis, are on the receiving end of and struggle with various issues related to climate, governance, and political economy. Necessarily, there will also be a conversation on the twofold ways of repair conducted by farmers: the ways in which the indigenous peoples have sought to repair their livelihoods, and the actions by which they repair their relationship to land, which is central to their culture and identity.
The research led to four main conclusions. First, indigenous farmers in Atok, Benguet, incur significant physical and socio-cultural losses and damages due to climate change. Second, despite the efforts of these farmers to adapt and mitigate these losses and damages, maladaptive practices, changing cultural values, and shifting governmental priorities make their efforts to adapt difficult. Third, climate impacts cannot be divorced from socio-economic intricacies and historical experiences. Fourth, in the face of climate impacts and cognizant of the temporal realities, reparations come into play. These reparations, however they are envisioned, must empower indigenous farmers and acknowledge, in their creation, the wider web of climate, economic, cultural, and historical injustices the farmers experience.
Physical and Socio-cultural: Understanding the various Losses and Damages
In Benguet, farmers report increased agricultural damages due to frost, hailstorms, and unpredictable weather. For instance, although communities have long experienced frost in the highlands and learned to mitigate its effects, they have noticed shifts in weather patterns as they now experience this hazard as late as March, which traditionally marks the start of the dry season.
Monsoon rains, on the other hand, have become erratic and unpredictable, leading to disruptions to farmers’ traditional planting cycles. The average temperature in Atok has also risen, preventing farmers from working outdoors for long periods due to the intense heat. As the highlands are known for their temperate weather, the increasing temperatures are new to the farmers. These climatic changes have physically impacted the communities: cropping cycles have been reduced from three to two per year, pest proliferation has been observed, and damage to crops has been extensive. On the other hand, some farmers note that the warming temperature has allowed them to nurture plant crops traditionally grown in lower elevations. This example demonstrates that, while the warming climate has brought L&D in many ways, farmers have nonetheless attempted to adapt to the rising temperatures to sustain their livelihoods.
Apart from the lived experiences of climatic and ecological changes, farmers also grapple with economic pressures such as vegetable importation, smuggling, and fluctuating prices. Poor market conditions exacerbate climate-specific hazards, significantly impacting the livelihoods of these indigenous farmers. Many are forced to discard their produce, shift to flower plantations, or transition to tourism-related activities as the agricultural market is dominated by imported and smuggled goods. Farmers have reported that because of the lack of pricing protection, they have been forced to throw their harvests off cliffs to cut their losses as they could not compete with the lower prices of smuggled goods. In any case, they always report a loss because of the expense of harvesting and transporting the vegetables from the highlands to Manila.
These socio-economic circumstances not only hamper the sustainability of their agricultural livelihood, but also erode communal practices and indigenous knowledge systems. This is especially evident in the sentiment among farmers that their children should pursue other livelihoods, or make farming a last resort, as agricultural trade and production involve numerous difficulties.
The Limits of Adaptation: Acknowledging that not all L&D can be avoided or adapted to
With immense threats due to climate and socio-economic circumstances, farmers have shifted to informal and community-based risk-sharing systems to mitigate their shared challenges. These risk-sharing systems take the form of mutual aid or informal loan and credit arrangements that support farmers. Through these informal structures, the communal ethos of indigenous societies is reinforced, shared cultural values and practices are reaffirmed, and support is mutually provided by farmers. However, as much as these systems provide much-needed support, they alone are insufficient to address the physical and socio-cultural losses that are experienced by the farmers, including cultural erosion and weakening community cohesion.
Government aid is often inadequate to meet local needs as farmers struggle to access meaningful support and navigate bureaucratic barriers. For instance, the post-disaster seed aid distributed by the government is often misaligned with the plant varieties and qualities used in the area. Often, government support would be inconsistent with their needs: with tractors replacing seeds, or greenhouses – expensive to maintain – being offered as solutions. Moreover, formal insurance systems are inadequate and inefficient: minimal support to farmers is granted, and access to claims is complex and arduous, especially for organic farmers, mostly women, with smaller plots of land to work on. Formal insurance mechanisms often involve thresholds on the volume of harvest and size of farmlands, which make them inaccessible for smallholder farmers. This adds another layer of complexity as these women-led, organic farms, are also more labor-intensive, as these organic plots are often managed by solo farmers. Additionally, even the informal and community-based risk-sharing mechanisms prioritize bigger farms over smaller shareholders, replicating – perhaps intentionally – the very issues that they are seeking to avoid and leaving farmers who are unable to find solutions within the government with no support.
These issues reflect broader shifts in governmental priorities and cultural values. Resources are increasingly diverted away from rural and agricultural sustainability, signaling a misalignment between political agendas and local needs. Seen through the lens of climate justice, this further exacerbates the vulnerability of already marginalized communities.
Socio-economic and Historical Intricacies: Contextualizing the climate storyline
Due to these challenging circumstances, the indigenous farmers, who have historically thrived on communal practices, are shifting to more individualistic and market-oriented values. Rather than relying on traditional knowledge, farmers utilize their own resources and judgment to address their specific needs.
Employing a decolonial perspective, this trend can be traced to the introduction of highland vegetable farming by the American colonial settlers. Indigenous farmers were driven to cultivate and supply produce such as lettuce, carrots, and cabbages, which are not native to the Igorot diet. This colonial underpinning further expands the challenges faced by indigenous farmers: cultivation, as it is currently practiced, is mainly an economic activity rather than a cultural tradition. The tension between collective approaches to aid and individualized responses to needs underscores the complexities of the indigenous experience.
Reparations: Questioning dominant understandings of repair
Connected to this study on loss and damage is the issue of climate reparations, especially for indigenous and marginalized communities. Here we use the term reparations to refer to how a national or local government allocates resources or seeks international funding in order to support communities within its own borders that are most affected by climate change. Here, the principle of equity is most fundamental: making sure that communities least responsible for the effects of the climate crisis are not left to bear its biggest burdens.
Specifically, in the context of the loss and damage discussions, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) assumes a central role. The FRLD’s Board, which is currently hosted by the Philippines, must create guidelines on the Fund’s operationalization that are highly nuanced and sensitive to the lived experiences at the grassroots level. FRLD must provide adequate, predictable, responsive, and accessible support for communities: bureaucratic technicalities must not hinder grassroots organizations from accessing the Fund, and the support given must not be misaligned with the needs at the local level. This inherently involves integrating indigenous and traditional knowledge systems into legal frameworks, as well as engaging communities to properly identify how the Fund should be made operational.
When it comes to creating policies and opportunities on ways of repair, the lived experiences of farmers have to be fully taken into account, lest the theoretical knowledge of the urban center be substituted for the practical and lived realities of the margins. The truth is that indigenous peoples have always understood how to recover, rehabilitate, and repair, whether in response to hazards, colonization, or government intrusion. However, their voices remain silenced, if not completely cast aside. Reparations, then, are not solely about climate impacts, but about addressing intergenerational harm wrought by systems that have long undermined indigenous autonomy.
To the Atok farmer, therefore, reparations mean their genuine participation in the aid process and in fora in which they are able to communicate their needs to the local government. It is not simply attendance but leadership; not merely an identification as a stakeholder, but participation as an actor. That their knowledge system, oft overlooked by governments insofar as it might not be aligned with “modern current knowledge,” remains meritorious and should be afforded immense value and approached with care.
A final note: while efforts to adequately provide climate reparations are welcome, we nonetheless argue that even commonplace concepts may require critical rethinking. In a world that quantifies justice in dollars, reparations risk becoming transactional rather than transformational. In a neoliberal world where money is used to equate with repair, and terms like just compensation are used, is there ever compensation, monetary or otherwise, for the indigenous, that is ever truly just? We argue that cultural heritage, which has been eroded in the indigenous communities in Atok, cannot simply be compensated for.