In planning and working to meet the changing conditions, experience indicates that both traditional knowledge and contemporary scientific knowledge can help to understand and improve the environment. The relationships between Native peoples and their environments provide significant insights and context for the scientific findings about climate change and its implications for human life. Building a bridge between contemporary scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge will be essential, for many tribal communities use traditional understandings, developed over many generations, to guide their uses of lands within their immediate political jurisdictions.

Although care should be taken in acting on results from models, which can provide reasonable estimates at a global scale but not necessarily at a regional scale, considering the “what if -- scenarios discussed in this paper can be a useful exercise by setting up plausible future outcomes. For example, in heightening our awareness of the potential environmental, social, and economic impacts that could occur should the climates change as projected in regions where Native peoples are located, we can begin to formulate strategies that could prove effective in mitigating those impacts. Better yet, we could even learn some lessons from traditional sustainable approaches to living with our environment such that other specific mitigation strategies become unnecessary.