The UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Southern Rock Islands of Palau, in the Pacific Ocean. Photo courtesy of Patrick Augelet for the Delegation of Palau to UNESCO.

As I watched, the banana flower’s purple-and-red fleshy petals blackened and puckered as Orapin folded them into the curry. With their stringy inner filaments and meaty texture, they would make a succulent complement to the young jackfruit, stirring in me a sense of recognition I could not exactly place. Artichoke, perhaps? Some earthy, savory texture on my tongue that defied easy description. I had been coming to cook, and chat, and swat away the flies every week at Orapin’s house down the road from mine in the village of Hua Ngom, in northern Thailand, ever since I learned that she excelled in vegetarian cooking and had welcomed me to spend Saturday mornings in her company. As a volunteer and the lone foreigner, I was eager to blend in and pick up as much local knowledge as I could, to grasp the intangible essence of Thai life and take it with me.

Orapin, a friend and neighbor of the author’s in Chiang Rai, Thailand, shares lunch at the Buddhist temple in Hua Ngom village. Photo courtesy of Tess McLoud.

Nothing like the taste of a banana-flower curry on my tongue to make me feel united with the sights and smells of the village. Orapin, small-statured, crinkly-smiling and tottering on her foam platform shoes, held sway in her outdoor kitchen among the chickens and cactus-like dragonfruit plants. Her recipes kept me coming back, although we never wrote them down — she knew them all by heart. I wonder now how I would go about recreating a taste of my village if I were to somehow find the right ingredients — a way to keep the spirit of that time alive.

Although less commonly recognized than its environmental threats, the impacts of climate change on culture may be equally devastating. The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), which recognizes and protects cultural heritage worldwide, deemed climate change a major factor of risk in 2005 and has been working since then to understand and counter its effects on culture. Low-lying island nations, especially Small Island Developing States (SIDS), are some of the first regions to experience the effects of the global climate crisis, and, with their small size and relative lack of resources, are especially threatened.

As rising waters eat away at the shores of islands and coastal regions, they also erode the transmission of cultural practices. Communities in affected regions are increasingly forced to uproot themselves from their homelands and face the choice of migrating and dispersing to new lands, threatening the connections they maintain with their traditional ways of life.

In the Pacific island nation of Palau, sea level rise is already threatening populations on the islands. Photo courtesy of Patrick Augelet for the Delegation of Palau to UNESCO.

A report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy lays out some of the threats to islands at the hands of climate shifts : damage to infrastructure, lower crop production, saltwater intrusion into aquifers, higher risk of disease, lower revenues from tourism, among other factors. In the South Pacific in particular, changes in trade winds have caused an average sea-level rise of one centimeter per year over a the last 30 years. Even without these effects, the globe is likely to rise on average between 26 and 98 centimeters by the end of the century. This creeping menace will indelibly impact the relationship between millions of island and coastal peoples and their land, potentially unleashing what has been deemed a migration crisis across the globe. President Anote Tong, of the critically threatened Pacific state of Kiribati, is already setting the groundwork for mass relocation of island populations, and other island nations may not be far behind.

The sad reality is that many millennia of cultural practices are in imminent danger, if peoples are scattered and their connections to their land annihilated.

Because traditional knowledge, which is lived between each person in a community, is such a fragile and changing object, it is at all the greater risk of being lost as people lose connections with their homes and their roots. The sad reality is that many millennia of cultural practices are in imminent danger, if peoples are scattered and their connections to their land annihilated. The ties between communities — the recipes, the songs, the stories — are by their very nature alive and dynamic. How can they ever be preserved and taken with us?

Intangible cultural knowledge, like the weaving skills of these indigenous Karen craftspeople, is threatened by the destabilization of climate change, poverty, and lack of communication. Photo courtesy of Tess McLoud.

The vast promise of the digital world can be one part of the answer this challenge — as young people connect on the Internet, they can also connect with their culture, and help incorporate it even more strongly into their identity.

A community dispersed over many islands, chased by environmental degradation, or seeking a better future, can join together and revitalize their ceremonies and language with the click of a mouse.

The Island Ark Project — an innovative platform that brings crowdsourcing to cultural preservation — proposes a tool to collect this knowledge and transform it into a dynamic online inventory. The platform creates an online space where communities can upload, share, comment on, and curate their cultural practices, from dances to rituals to oral histories, and keep a sense of connection with them wherever they go.

Through this community-based web platform, a young Tuvaluan can record his grandfather’s fishing practices, his aunt’s taro recipe, and his sister’s dances — so that he can access all of these when he moves away from his island home. An elementary school student in Koror, Palau, can learn how to conduct research on his own culture, sharpening his technical skills, by interviewing his family members and recording their stories and recipes, which he can share with his friends online. A community dispersed over many islands, chased by environmental degradation, or seeking a better future, can join together and revitalize their ceremonies and language with the click of a mouse.

Youth in indigenous societies hold the key for passing traditional culture on, staying interconnected trough the web. Photo courtesy of Tess McLoud.

Through incorporating youth empowerment, education, indigenous self-determination, and social networking, Island Ark Project responds to the challenges of connectivity and cultural transmission that threaten traditional communities.

As I recall Orapin’s imperial manner in the kitchen, I smile to think about the times we shared. Although I was not Thai, I felt a deep connection to the culture as I took part in a meal at her red plastic table. Through the warm, earthy aroma of her cooking, a place and people came to life.

The identity of a community, as captured by their stories, their skills, their practices, and their beliefs, is the most precious asset they hold. The ability to regain control over this identity, to shape it and preserve it going into the future, has the possibility to breathe new life into these societies. Although our global community is facing unprecedented challenges, we can combat these destructive forces by forging stronger connections in the digital world, and giving these threatened cultural networks innovative tools to unite them.

Across time and space, these precious connections need to be nurtured and maintained. With resources such as the Island Ark Project’s platform, people can stay in touch with their heritage, and ensure that their traditions live on.

Tess McLoud, Island Ark Project

Island Ark is conducting a crowdfunding campaign to enable the development of their platform through an on-the-ground research study to Palau in March, 2016. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to help combat climate-related cultural loss and take part in the discussion.

Tess McLoud is Communications Director at Island Ark Project and a member of the Delegation of Palau to UNESCO. She lived and worked in northern Thailand as a United States Peace Corps volunteer for over two years. She is passionate about cultural dialogue, climate change adaptation, and banana-flower curry.