A Comparative Approach to New Climate Stories: Indigenous Climate Knowledge From the Yunnan Forests and the Tibetan Plateau in China

ABSTRACT This research takes a comparative approach to theorise Indigenous climate knowledge and reimagine global understandings of climate change. It explores the possibilities of joining different Indigenous practices to make a united critique of dominant climate discourses. Our ethnographic study weaves together two geographically and culturally distinct cases—Ganjia and Nyanpo Yutse herders in Tibetan high‐altitude grasslands, and Akha and Dai farmers in Yunnan subtropical mountains. The ethnographic comparison theorises Indigenous climate knowledge from three dimensions (ontology, epistemology and ethics), each addressing an existing major critique of contemporary climate discourse: First, historically mobile livelihoods (seasonal rotation and swidden agriculture) and cultural acceptance of uncertainty make climate a daily change versus an unprecedented crisis faced by all humanity (ontology). Second, embodied and multisensory knowledge of nonhumans (livestock sheep and edible plants) formed in long‐term coevolution provides changing signs of climate versus the positivist and reductionist science of climate itself (epistemology). Third, recurring grassroots practices (snow monitoring and seed saving) and renewed reciprocal relations with nonhumans create agency and hope versus the imaginaries of unavoidable future apocalypse (ethics). Treating climate as an evolving cultural idea, our systemic comparison provides critical reflection on contemporary climate culture by telling new Indigenous stories, stories about how humans make multispecies and meaningful home in climatic uncertainties.