Abstract: Global change vulnerability assessments are an integral part of sustainability science. These studies explore the sensitivity and resilience of coupled human-environment systems and the coping strategies people may use in response to the interactions of important stresses, including but not limited to climate change, pollution, and economic restructuring. Understanding how global climate change manifests locally is a part of such analysis. Yet the most common analytical tool for understanding future climate changes ? General Circulation Models (GCMs) ? project climate at spatial resolutions too coarse for depicting local-scale dynamics. Additional methods are therefore needed to understand how global climate change may affect local places. These methods must include not only classical Western scientific techniques but also traditional indigenous knowledge about the dimensions of climate that are important for local human-environment systems. The science hinges largely on downscaling, a technique for translating GCM output to fine spatial scales. The knowledge of indigenous peoples, in this case, hinges largely on how climate affects the process of reindeer herding, viewed mainly in terms of snow quality. Yet neither the identification of snow quality as a critical variable nor the definition of this variable can be done without the direct and sustained involvement of stakeholders in the analytical process. This presentation describes a nascent vulnerability assessment that couples climate science with indigenous knowledge, in an indigenous (Saami) reindeer herding community of northern Norway. A number of issues will be discussed, such as the definition of place in relation to global phenomena, the identification of stakeholders and what constitutes appropriate scientist-stakeholder interactions, and the task of translating among languages and disciplines.
