Based on four consecutive international meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the author describes her experiences negotiating with governments in her capacity as Co-Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples' Forum on Climate Change. She provides an insider view from an Indigenous perspective of the establishment of the Paris Agreement and the struggle to ensure its effective impementation, including official recognition of the importance of traditional knowledge for Indigenous resilience in the face of climate change.

The Iñupiat Eskimo on Alaska’s North Slope live semi-traditional lives characterized by subsistence hunting and fishing and expansive natural travel networks. To the Iñupiat, the North Slope coastline is a social-cultural boundary between sea and land, marked by the location of past and current settlements, burial sites, family hunting locations, traditional places of refuge, and places immortalized through traditional stories. The coastline is where they observe, enter and exit the marine environment, and hence is interwoven throughout their local and traditional knowledge of the ocean and sea ice environment. Rarely, do local experts speak of ocean or ice features, or of a hunting story, without referring to a place on land. North Slope communities and their coastline are also staging areas for scientists who have adopted the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas as their natural laboratories. This chapter will explore a cross-section of the North Slope’s rich history of scientists working with local indigenous experts on coastal and marine topics, with specific attention to coastal emergency preparedness.

Community-based research can produce many outcomes: from the documentation of knowledge to the connection of different types of knowledge to the true co-production of knowledge. In this chapter, we describe our experiences with two projects that lie along this spectrum. The Bering Sea Project documented local and traditional knowledge about the region’s ecosystem, leading to papers that presented that knowledge, connected it to other ways of understanding the human role in the ecosystem and developed a new understanding of the ways in which ecosystem conditions affect hunting success. The Bidarki Project started as an ecological study of a keystone intertidal grazer and developed into a co-production effort exploring history and culture to explain today’s patterns in intertidal abundance. In both cases, the path towards co-production started with personal relationships and continued by taking advantage of opportunities that arose during the course of each project. Not all community-based projects will result in co-production of knowledge nor is that outcome the only measure of success, but all will benefit from the essential foundations of true collaboration which are mutual respect and intellectual equality.