Storytelling among indigenous peoples is central to the intergenerational transmission of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), allowing for human adaptation to new social-ecological contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the potential applications of storytelling in guiding climate change adaptation efforts. In this chapter, we present a number of case studies from all over the world in which indigenous stories and traditional oral narratives have been applied to inform culturally sensitive climate change adaptation strategies. We contend that greater consideration of indigenous ontologies, as transmitted through storytelling, can contribute towards making climate change communication and adaptation more acceptable to local communities, facilitating intercultural discussions and bridging worldviews. Our chapter shows that attention to and promotion of indigenous storytelling can lead to enhanced understanding of diverse values and perceptions around climate change, hence allowing climate change adaptation strategies to become tailored to the local contexts where they are implemented.

In order to make the concept of social-ecological resilience and resilience governance comprehensible in a legal context the study first established some general governance features that represents the core of resilience governance. These features are the core of what a legal design for social-ecological resilience should reflect. However, law must also safe guard the legal principles and legal characteristics of law and its role as a stable institutional base with binding requirements. The study reviewed both possible matches and potential obstacles where law may not sufficiently reflect resilience governance. However, it also unveiled legal mechanisms that contributes in other ways than expected. All in all, a general conclusion is that law has many important features that matches resilience governance and thus has the potential to form an important basis for resilience governance in many different settings.

Despite the fast development of environmental governance and environmental law over the past decades, the world is facing fundamental threats to the environment and the earth system. Many scholars argue that the world is entering the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch represented by the fact that the earth is now in an unprecedented way shaped by human activities. In addition to reflecting the global scale of the environmental problems, this perspective also emphasizes the complex and intertwined relationship between the human and the natural systems (i.e., the social and the ecological). Research on social-ecological resilience provides a theoretical framework for the governance of such complexity. This governance calls also for new legal approaches and pose significant challenges for legal design. The purpose of this book is to explore the resilience theories and concepts, focusing on their compatibility with international and EU environmental law.