Farmers in southern Uganda seek information to anticipate the interannual variability in the timing and amount of precipitation, a matter of great importance to them since they rely on rain-fed agriculture for food supplies and income.
This article describes how farmers of Burkina Faso predict seasonal rainfall and examines how their forecasts relate to those produced by meteorological science. Farmers’ forecasting knowledge encompasses shared and selective repertoires. Most farmers formulate expectations from observation of natural phenomena.
Rapid changes to the climate are predicted over the next few years, and these present challenges for women’s empowerment and gender equality on a completely new scale. There is little evidence or research to provide a reliable basis for gender-sensitive approaches to agricultural adaptation to 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.
The benefits of indigenous knowledge within disaster risk reduction are gradually being acknowledged and identified. However, despite this acknowledgement there continues to be a gap in reaching the right people with the correct strategies for disaster risk reduction.
The threat of global climate change has caused concern among scientists because crop production could be severely affected by changes in key climatic variables that could compromise food security both globally and locally.
The focus of the great majority of climate change impact studies is on changes in mean climate. In terms of climate model output, these changes are more robust than changes in climate variability. By concentrating on changes in climate means, the full impacts of climate change on biological and human systems are probably being seriously underestimated.
Traditional knowledge’ gained political space in international environmental policy up until the early 1990s as a result of three areas of growing concern: environmental sustainability, indigenous peoples’ rights and the commercial potential of traditional knowledge.
While the TKRC, as Oguamanam has observed, has vastly improved the scope and depth of the IPC, one can argue that classifications abstracted from context can result in a demeaning of practices, to a lessening of its aura and a negation of its meanings and aesthetics.
Livestock systems in developing countries are characterised by rapid change, driven by factors such as population growth, increases in the demand for livestock products as incomes rise, and urbanisation. Climate change is adding to the considerable development challenges posed by these drivers of change.