African farming systems are highly heterogeneous: between agroecological and socioeconomic environments, in the wide variability in farmers’ resource endowments and in farm management. This means that single solutions (or ‘silver bullets’) for improving farm productivity do not exist.
Recent trends in abrupt weather changes continue to pose a challenge to agricultural production most especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper specifically addresses the questions on how local farmers read and predict the weather; and how they can collaborate with weather scientists in devising adaptation strategies for climate variability (CV) in the Okavango Delta of Botswana.
African farming systems are highly heterogeneous: between agroecological and socioeconomic environments, in the wide variability in farmers’ resource endowments and in farm management. This means that single solutions (or ‘silver bullets’) for improving farm productivity do not exist.
In communal areas of NE Zimbabwe, feed resources are collectively managed, with herds grazing on grasslands during the rainy season and mainly on crop residues during the dry season, which creates interactions between farmers and competition for organic resources. Addition of crop residues or animal manure is needed to sustain agricultural production on inherently poor soils.
Technological interventions to address the problem of poor productivity of smallholder agricultural systems must be designed to target socially diverse and spatially heterogeneous farms and farming systems.
Indigenous education in Chile operates within a context of cultural diversity, underdevelopment and colonialism. This problem explains the tension found in 28 rural schools in the Araucania region of Chile between the knowledge systems of the Mapuche culture and those of Western culture. The study is qualitative-descriptive in design.
Pastoralism is not only a livestock-based livelihood strategy but also a way of life with sociocultural norms and values, and indigenous knowledge revolving around livestock. Pastoral systems in Africa are facing demographic, economic, socio-political and climatic pressures which are driving many pastoralists into non-livestock based livelihood strategies.
The agro-ecological knowledge held by Ovambo farmers in North Central Namibia has, for centuries, given them resilience to high levels of climate variability and associated impacts. New research, conducted in North Central Namibia, suggests that knowledge co-production between farmers and agricultural extension workers may, in addition, strengthen adaptive capacity to future climate change.
A generalized vulnerability framework was used to structure an interdisciplinary and intercultural examination of factors that influence the ways in which reindeer pastoralism in Finnmark (northern Norway) may be affected by climate change. Regional and local (downscaled) climate projections included scenarios that can potentially influence foraging conditions for reindeer.
he connection between indigenous knowledge systems and disaster resilience derives from both theory and practice highlighting potential contributions of indigenous knowledge to building resilient communities.