Environmental Science Prize for Álvaro Fernández- Llamazares

ICTA-UAB researcher Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares has been awarded the First Prize in the "Research Activity" category of the 4th edition of Premis Ciències Ambientals organised by the Col.legi d´Ambientòlegs de Catalunya (COAMB) and the Associació Catalana de Ciències Ambientals (ACCA).

24/11/2015

The Premis Ciències Ambientals aim to raise awareness of the vital role that environmental sciences have in social, economic and cultural transformations of the 21st century. They also recognize the progression of environmental studies in Catalonia, interdisciplinary research, entrepreneurship in the field of the environment and the work done to publicize the challenges to environmental sustainability.

The "Research Activity" category rewards students of postgraduate programs (PhD and master’s degrees) and teaching and research staff from universities and research institutes in the field of environment and sustainability in Catalonia.

The project "Global Change seen through the eyes of indigenous Amazonians” aims to assess how Global Environmental Change affects the local environmental knowledge held by a native society in the Bolivian Amazonia: the Tsimané hunter-gatherers. The main objective of the study is to understand how indigenous peoples perceive and interpret environmental changes in their territory, and to demonstrate empirically how their local environmental knowledge is threatened by Global Change. Fernandez Llamazares spent 15 months living with the Tsimané hunter-gatherers, in the department of Beni (Bolivia), a community located three days by canoe from the nearest town.

The results of the study show that indigenous peoples are facing a growing number of threats caused by Global Environmental Change which undermine the adaptive capacity of indigenous knowledge in the face of rapid environmental changes. The researcher points out that indigenous traditional knowledge of great ecological value is extinct due to Global Environmental Change. As an example, Fernández-Llamazares has recorded how certain climate indicators traditionally used by indigenous populations to predict the weather – and to plan hunting and agricultural activities – are losing their effectiveness, probably because of the increased climate variability observed in recent decades.