Future climate and land use changes challenge current dependencies on wild food harvesting by rural indigenous communities

Abstract

Traditional food systems support the livelihoods and well-being of rural Indigenous communities, particularly in remote, asset-poor areas. However, the diversity of wild foods is in global decline under the accelerating impacts of climate and environmental change with major but poorly understood implications for dependent communities. Here, we combine a comprehensive systematic household survey involving 400 households from 18 rural Indigenous settlements across the Republic of Sakha, a vast and climate change sensitive region in the Russian Far East, with species distribution models for 51 food species of animals, plants, and fungi to (i) profile current household dependencies on wild food harvesting; (ii) project future (2050s) changes in the regional distribution and local availability of wild foods under alternative climate and land use change scenarios; and (iii) discuss their combined potential implications. We find that current dependencies, understood as shares of the total food consumed and income by household, are on average relatively low across settlements, albeit with important regional variability. Remote and isolated settlements in the Arctic region of the Republic of Sakha have greater levels of dependency with stronger links to animal products, while those in the southern and central regions, which are better connected and closer to major urban areas, have lower levels of dependency and are dominated by nonanimal products (plant-based products and fungi). These dependency patterns contrast with projected changes in the regional distribution and local availability of food species, signaling major turnovers of species with important potential implications for dependent rural livelihoods.

Keywords: climate change; household dependency; rural communities; traditional food systems; wild harvesting.

Fig. 1.

Map of the Republic of Sakha showing the boundaries of the major economic administrative regions and the locations of the 18 settlements.

Fig. 2.

Dependency on wild harvesting of households from rural settlements of the Republic of Sakha based on consumption frequency (dietary dependency) and income share (economic dependency) of wild foods. The figure provides the A) overall dietary dependencies of the average household by settlement (i.e. over all foods consumed and income sources); B) income-share dependence partition (pie charts) of the average household for two settlements representative of the Arctic (Kharyalakh) and non-Arctic (Rassoloda) regions, with indication of the corresponding distribution of the wild food share among food groups (silhouettes); and C) the average proportion by household of wild foods consumed for each food group (error bars corresponding to 1 SD). Note that in (B), proportions of plant-based (inc. vegetables, nuts, berries, and fruits) and fungi shares are grouped together. Total income refers to the household unit whether the adult-equivalent income is a per person measure where children and the elderly are assigned smaller weights so that the measure is directly comparable to the poverty line (see Materials and methods).

Fig. 3.

Richness of wild food species across the Republic of Sakha. Maps show predicted A) contemporary (1991–2010) and B, C) future (2041–2060) richness under the B) SSP1.26 and C) SSP5.85 scenarios. Future values represent the mean projected richness with associated variability (D: SSP126, E: SSP585) of the five general circulation models used to generate projections (see Materials and methods for details).

Fig. 4.

Projected shifts in the distribution centroid of wild food species in the Republic of Sakha. The rose plots show the shift distances (radial scale; ×100 km) and direction (angular scale) of future (2041–2060) shifts in the distribution centroid of contemporary (1991–2010) ranges for each species of A, F) plants (n = 14), B, G) fungi (n = 8), C, H) mammals (n = 7), D, I) resident birds (n = 6), and E, J) migratory birds (n = 16) under the (A–E) SSP1.26 and (F–J) SSP5.85 scenarios projected for each general circulation model used in the study (grouped according to point color). The arrows in the small plots show the mean shift direction and distance for the entire group across all models.

Fig. 5.

Projected changes in the mean habitat suitability and composition of wild food species available to some representative rural settlements in the Republic of Sakha. A) Box-violin plots (left subpanel) showing the overall distribution of mean habitat suitability for the local assemblage of food species under current (1991–2010) and future (2041–2060) conditions for the two emission scenarios, and scatterplots (right subpanel) of the mean current vs future habitat suitability for the SSP1.26 and SSP5.85 scenarios. Each point represents one species with values corresponding to the grand mean of all grid cell suitability values within a radius of 100 km from each settlement averaged, in the case of future projections, across all five climate models considered. Significant differences among groups were tested via the Kruskal–Wallis test with the χ² statistic and corresponding P-value provided on top of the box-violin plots with the bars displayed below indicating statistically significant pairwise differences tested via Dunn's test adjusted via the Holm method. Species in the scatterplots are grouped by food group (point shapes) and changes in local availability (point color) as projected by the model based on a 10% suitability threshold (see Materials and methods for details). The dashed line represents the 1:1 line, with points above/on/below the line indicating species experiencing an increase/no change/decrease in habitat suitability in the future compared with current conditions. The slope of the gray solid line indicates the overall change in habitat suitability for the community of food species locally available to each settlement. The numbers by each settlement name indicate the current species richness of the local assemblage (R) and the species projected to be gained (G) and lost (L) for each scenario. B) Boxplots showing local (within a 100-km radius) changes in habitat suitability for some representative species in the six settlements shown in (A). Points above the boxplots indicate the future projected establishment or extirpation of a species from the corresponding local assemblages. Boxplots in white indicate settlements where the species is predicted to be absent both currently and in the future.