Multispecies Roundtable for Climate Impact: A Speculative Proposal

Abstract

The Philippines is one of the most typhoon prone countries in world (Bankoff, 2003), and its government has invested significantly in data technology which has proven to be critical in planning for climate impact. However, there is conflict as to how this data ought to be interpreted and used by the technoscientific community on one hand and, on the other, by sectors of society who rely on traditional and embodied knowledge of the natural environment. How do we interpret the information equitably to make decisions that can protect lives, natural and artificial resources, and livelihoods? We take artist Angelo Vermeulen’s notion of a multispecies roundtable for co-creating systems —in which plants, computers, and people are brought together in mutually beneficial ways (Vermeulen, 2016)—and apply it to the context of natural disaster management. Based on our previous experience working in post-disaster reconstruction and design (Cajilig & Salva, 2014), we propose a design concept to integrate ethnoscientific models for weather and climate prediction by indigenous and artisanal groups.