Supporting Tribal Data Governance for Community Resilience: A Southwest Indigenous Climate Summit

Indigenous communities use data, information, and knowledge to support climate resilience decision-making; however, the governance of that data raises challenges that have implications for tribal sovereignty. Challenges include the limited availability of environmental data for tribal lands, and the fact that available data may not reflect community values and needs. In response to these challenges, the University of Arizona's CLIMAS (Climate Assessment for the Southwest) program and Native Nations Institute, in collaboration with the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network formed the Southwest Indigenous Climate Summit. This event serves as a forum for regional conversations regarding how to strengthen community climate resilience by drawing on the emerging framework of Indigenous data sovereignty, the availability of Indigenous knowledge, and deep place-based knowledge.

For our presentation, we will describe the context, development process and outcomes from this event. This one and a half day working meeting included tribal leaders and community members, academic scholars, private foundations, and federal government officials. Through Indigenous research and evaluation methods, we worked to build shared knowledge around data sovereignty as it relates to Indigenous community climate resilience and environmental health in the US Southwest. This project also supports the development of a network of people focused on community-driven climate resilience work. This research model and project demonstrates opportunities and strategies for strengthening partnerships between and among Indigenous communities, federal partners and universities to improve data-use for building community climate resilience.