Today we're going to talk about the local indicators of climate change impacts in more detail. This LICCI is actually a product that is based in ICTA-UAB, and a group of scientists. The core team members of LICCI have developed the definition of local indicators of climate change impacts. What is it? It's the indigenous peoples and local communities first-hand observations of changes in local weather and climatic variabilities as well as changes in local Social Ecological Systems which are attributed to climate change and grouped on people's interaction with their direct surroundings. This qualitative place-based observations of climate change impacts, can be then categorized into indicators. The LICCIs are actually a level up from the local observations. Then in turn, LICCI can be grouped based on the natural elements or process reportedly being impacted, which can be then further grouped into sub-systems. Ultimately corresponding to the four main system; climatic, physical, biological, and socio-economic. Here is the LICCI classification that was developed by the core team members of the LICCI product. You can actually go to this web page to have a very detailed look of how this classification is organized. We divide the classification from more of a top-down. From the system goes to the sub-system and then impacted elements and LICCI. The systems contains four systems, climatic, physical, biological, and human systems. Then for each of the four system, we have several sub-systems according to it. Also, within each sub-system, we have different impacted elements according to each sub-system. Also, you divide it down, that we will have LICCIs. LICCIs are all the changes in accordingly those impacted elements, sub-system and system. Changes in mean temperature, for example, the observation could be it's hotter now. It feels hotter than before, it feels hotter than 10 years ago. This could be a change in the mean temperature. Let's talk about how to identify a LICCI in the community level and when you are in the community, or when you're working with indigenous and local communities, how do you identify a LICCI? LICCI, you'll have to start with observations. Basically, you ask people what kind of changes have you noticed over the past 10 years? Or what changes have you noticed over your lifetime in the environment? I give you an example. People probably will answer, "The wildflower is flowering earlier." This is a change. Now the wildflowers probably flowering in April instead of May. The drivers, you continue asking about, what do you think caused those changes? Wildflower is flowering earlier, and people might give you an answer because they say the weather is hotter than before, so the flower is flowering earlier. You can see this is the locally perceived changes and this would be the drive for the changes from the local perspective. Therefore we can say, they classified that chestnut tree is flowering earlier into the LICCI changes in wild plant species flowering time. You can see the flow from local observations and determine the driver if it's climate related. Then we can look at the classification system, the web page I showed you in the previous slides into different LICCIs. We also have this LACCI system. What is the LACCI classification? LACCI is a local adaptation to climate change impacts. For example, people mention the weather. The weather has become hotter than before, and it might have some impacts to their daily lives. What we usually follow is a question, what do you do to cope with the hotter weather? People might answer, I go to the field, or I go to do farming earlier, or I tend to go to the field later when it's cooler. This could be an adaptation strategy because people are actually making some changes in their activities to actually react to the changes in the weather patterns. We also developed this local adaptation tree to climate change impacts. You can go to this website to check in detail as well. Also, we have published this paper on the Current Opinion in Environmental sustainability. It has quite good explanations as well for what is actually a LICCI and how to identify a LICCI. I'm going to briefly talk about how to identify LICCI in the framework of the LICCI project, because we do not consider adaptation strategies that led by the government or that led by organizations as a LICCI because it's very top-down approach, and households and individuals are not very actively involved and it doesn't place much of the impacts on their daily lives. For example, when I was doing field work, there are a lot of government-led adaptation strategies to heat waves and to drought. The government would make artificial rain-making and try to trigger the rains for the crops to grow. But for household and individuals in the village, they do not participate in such activities, so we do not count those government-led or organizational-led interventions as LICCI, as local adaptations. We are more looking on the household level or on the individual level, what people do to cope with, to respond to the changes that was triggered by climate change impacts. On the different levels, household and individual, like I mentioned the example, people might change their working schedule to respond to this heat weather, to respond to this hot weather, to respond to the heat waves. Also, we have this different format. Is it an adaptation or is it a coping strategy? Adaptation in the LICCI framework, we talk about long-term adaptations, long-term responses. For example, the field is becoming dryer or there has been a great drought, so people started to build dams, or people started to build canals, try to navigate water. That could be a long-term impact, so we consider that as an adaptation. But for coping, it's more immediate action. It's very immediate and none lasting action that is immediate reaction to some may be extreme weather events like flooding. If the flooding happened in the community and people might just go to their relative's house because their housing was destroyed by the flooding, that's more of the coping. There's no long-term solutions to this change, it's more of immediate and onsite reactions. Also, there's a possibility in lot of cases that one LICCI, one local adaptation to climate change impacts is possibly a response to several LICCIs. For example, people are changing their working schedules. It's a response to the hot weather. Also, it's a response to the heat waves or it's a response to the the sunshine intensity. It could be one LICCI is related to several LICCIs, but they have to be always linked with climate change impacts.
