Read the following passage carefully:
While contemporary global climate adaptation frameworks increasingly pay lip service to Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), their inclusion remains deeply flawed, operating primarily through a lens of empirical reductionism. Policy institutions frequently treat holistic, intergenerational ecological wisdom as a repertoire of unrefined 'data points' to be harvested, validated, and subsumed under Western scientific paradigms and algorithmic modeling. This selective cognitive extraction strips localized knowledge of its foundational cosmological context, severing ecological insights from the customary governance structures, ethical relations, and land tenure rights in which they are inextricably embedded. Far from fostering genuine collaboration, such utilitarian assimilation perpetuates epistemic injustice by reinforcing hierarchical knowledge valuation, where indigenous perspectives are deemed legitimate only when corroborated by technocratic metrics. Concurrently, it reduces frontline communities from active institutional sovereign actors to passive providers of raw environmental observations. True socio-ecological resilience cannot be achieved through bureaucratic subsumption or piecemeal integration. Instead, it necessitates a fundamental transition toward epistemic pluralism—an institutional framework that recognizes Indigenous Knowledge Systems as autonomous, self-validating epistemologies. Achieving this imperative requires restructuring climate governance to establish equitable co-management architectures, thereby restoring decision-making sovereignty and structural agency to traditional custodians.
Based on the passage provided above, which of the following options best expresses the central theme intended by the author?
- Authentic climate resilience requires abandoning utilitarian assimilation of traditional wisdom in favor of recognizing indigenous knowledge as autonomous epistemologies within co-governance frameworks.Answer
- BIntegrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems into global climate models is technically infeasible due to the lack of standardized empirical metrics and quantitative environmental datasets.
- CThe primary obstacle to effective climate adaptation is the complete absence of scientific validation for intergenerational ecological practices in policy frameworks.
- DTo achieve socio-ecological resilience, modern climate policy must entirely reject Western technocratic metrics in favor of exclusive reliance on customary governance structures.