Indigenous resilience to disasters in Taiwan and beyond

This paper is the Introduction to a Special Issue which is a follow-up to a conference in Taipei to explore the interrelated themes of climate change and Indigenous knowledge-based re-sponses, and Indigenous community resilience with specific reference to Typhoon Morakot. The goals of this Special Issue are to discuss the international experience with Indigenous resilience; to review Indigenous knowledge for adaptation to disasters; and to generate a conversation among scholars, Indigenous peoples, and policy-makers to move the agenda forward. Rapid global environmental change requires creative responses to maintain policy options and flexibility in making decisions—the resilience approach. When combined with iterative learning-by-doing, this approach generates adaptive governance. Resilience can be built based on Indigenous and local knowledge. We focus on Indigenous resilience: the ways in which cultural factors such as knowledge and learn-ing, along with the broader political ecology, determine how local and Indigenous people under-stand, deal with, and adapt to environmental change.