Crafting Climate Solutions for Nature-Dependent Subsistence Communities: A Dignity-Centric View.

This article focuses on developing a dignity-centric framework for crafting climate resilience solutions tailored to nature-dependent subsistence communities (NDSCs), which are communities relying directly on local environmental resources for their basic needs. Based on six years of ethnographic research in a South Indian subsistence fishing community, the framework integrates both deontological (process-based) and teleological (outcome-based) dignity considerations, emphasizing community self-determination, inclusion, and respectful external facilitation. It highlights three key dialectical tensions that climate solutions must navigate within NDSCs: cultural continuity versus cultural adaptation, place rootedness versus spatial mobility, and consumption adequacy versus aspirational consumption. The research advocates for bottom-up, community-embedded approaches that prioritize the voices and lived experiences of NDSC members over top-down technocratic interventions, aiming to foster climate solutions that preserve dignity while addressing complex social and environmental challenges.