Global Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan: A Critical Bibliometric Analysis and Review

Abstract

In recent years, the subject of Indigenous peoples and global climate change adaptation has become a rapidly growing area of international study. Despite this trend, Taiwan, home to many Indigenous communities, has received relatively little attention. To date, no comprehensive review of the literature on Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples and global climate change has been conducted. Therefore, this article presents a bibliometric analysis and literature review of both domestic and international studies on Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples in relation to resilience, climate change, and climate shocks in the 10-year period after Typhoon Morakot (2009). We identified 111 domestic and international peer-reviewed articles and analyzed their presentation of the current state of knowledge, geographical and temporal characteristics, and Indigenous representation. Most studies were discovered to focus on post-disaster recovery, particularly within the context of Typhoon Morakot, as well as Indigenous cultures, ecological wisdom, and community development. This study also discovered relatively few studies investigating how traditional ecological knowledge systems can be integrated into climate change adaptation. Most studies also adopted a somewhat narrow focus on Indigenous resilience. Large-scale quantitative and longitudinal studies are found to be in their infancy. We observed a geographical skewness among the studies in favor of southern Taiwan and relatively limited engagement with contemporary studies on Indigenous peoples and climate change. We furthermore determined a large overlap between the destruction path of Morakot and study sites in the articles. Indigenous scholars have managed to find a voice among domestic and international outlets, and an increasing number of scholars have argued for more culturally sensitive approaches to post-disaster recovery and disaster management in Taiwan.