This article is part of a series of special thought pieces that APRI is publishing in partnership with the African Climate Foundation in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow. The series is titled From Rio 1992 to COP26: Africa’s Climate Journey and the Road Ahead.

Highlights

Introduction and Context

The African continent has disproportionately borne the brunt of climate-related impacts, mainly due to its limited adaptation capacity. According to the United Nation’s global report on food crisis, in 2020 alone, about 97.9 million people in Africa were in crisis (Food Security Information Network, 2021). Climate change has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, giving communities short periods to recover. And the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, dubbed a ‘code red for humanity’, projects a further increase in the frequency and occurrence of climatic impacts (IPCC, 2021). The UN Secretary-General has stressed the need to combine forces to avert climate catastrophe.

The crises are more catastrophic when they affect the farming communities. Farming systems in Africa are mainly rain-fed. Thus, farmers need a forecast to assess the farming opportunities that a season presents and avert or mitigate against some of the potential negative impacts. Detecting, monitoring, analyzing and forecasting climate hazards in Africa is challenged foremost by insufficient data, stemming from an inadequate investment in observation infrastructure. These challenges are compounded by a rainfall regime characterized by high variability both in space and time, which impacts the accuracy and reliability of the sparse meteorological institutions’ forecasts. Spatial variability implies that the few stations available do not give an accurate picture of the climate. This inaccuracy creates the need for location-specific climate information, which is unavailable in many African countries.

Great strides have been made to improve climate science at the national level in many countries. However, many challenges still remain in providing a much-needed early warning systems in Africa.

Most of the existing systems have been developed without the input of the vulnerable communities they are meant to serve. In areas where early warning systems are present, they are not translating into early action. In fact, the state of the climate in Africa report noted the limited uptake and use of climate information services in development planning and practice in Africa, attributing it in part to the lack of reliable and timely climate information (World Meteorological Organization, 2019). Indigenous knowledge and systems could help bridge some of these gaps.

The African continent has been experiencing extreme events as far back as records exist. Different cultures have different ways of documenting extreme events marked by the absence of written accounts. These indigenous methods could provide a way to accurately reconstruct historical data. For example, naming has been used in many cultures to describe the event surrounding the birth of a child. The Luo tribe in Kenya, for example, named the children born in times of famine ‘Akech/Okech’ derived from the word ‘kech’, hunger. A child born during drought was called Aoro/Ooro from the word oro, drought. This naming system is replicated in many other tribes and could aid in reconstructing climatic events. The systems provide a way to document and verify past extreme climate events where in situ rainfall data is unavailable.

Integrating Indigenous Knowledge with Climate Science

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) stated that local communities continued to rely heavily on indigenous knowledge to conserve the environment and deal with natural disasters (UNEP 2008). The report describes how a vast body of indigenous knowledge on disaster management and climate change adaptation exists among communities, particularly in hazard-prone areas. Unlike formal classroom-based education, this information is transmitted through oral tradition, learned from experience, acquired through observation and study, and orally handed down from generation to generation within select members of the communities. Communities easily identify with indigenous knowledge systems, which have enabled them to live sustainably with their environments for generations. These indigenous knowledge systems also function as essential tools in environmental conservation and natural disaster management.

Similarly, even though both the frequency and intensity of extreme events have increased due to climate change, communities have developed coping strategies that have been passed down the generations. According to the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security indigenous methodologies of predicting climatic events, early warning systems, adaptation and environmental protection strategies exist in most rural communities (CCAFS, 2017).

Unfortunately, the continent faces the danger of losing its indigenous knowledge and strategies, often labelled ‘primitive’, in exchange for western technologies.

While embracing scientific innovations is one way of building resilience in Africa, the continent lacks the funding or the infrastructure to implement these technologies. The result is increased poverty as communities abandon local knowledge without access to scientific knowledge. Moreover, introducing sophisticated technologies alone may not be optimal without understanding the historical and cultural context or knowing where to prioritize deployment. Finding ways to integrate and blend indigenous and scientific knowledge is the key to building resilience in Africa.

The relevance of indigenous knowledge was acknowledged and endorsed globally as far back as July 1999 at the World Conference on Science in Budapest, Hungary. The conference recommended that scientific and traditional knowledge be integrated, especially in the environment and development. The UNEP also recognizes the role of indigenous knowledge in conserving natural resources and managing natural disasters. Throughout the continent, the integration of community-based forecasting and scientific forecasting has been successfully demonstrated to provide early warning weather and climate information for local communities in Malawi, Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Swaziland and Tanzania, to mention a few.

Consultative and Inclusive Examples of Climate Services for Adaptation and Resilience

The Nganyi rainmakers in western Kenya are one of the most renowned indigenous forecasters, with the consistency in the accuracy of their weather predictions being matched by few. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has documented the Nganyi’s climate risk reduction knowledge (UNISDR, 2015). The Nganyi community preserves the local forest and uses it as a shrine that serves as a means of rainfall observations and prediction, with the knowledge passed down the generations through select families who take the community role of rainmakers. Over and above the inherent cultural myths, the use of hygroscopic plants, snakes, insects and other flora and fauna for observation and prediction has been proven to have a scientific basis (Ouma et al., 2013). The Nganyi rainmakers provide their community with forecasts and are renowned in the region for their weather prediction skills. Their partnership with the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) through support from IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre (ICPAC) has led to the generation of what was termed a consensus forecast: before each rainfall season, the rainmakers and meteorologists would agree on the season’s forecast. This forecast would then be disseminated in the local language through a community-based radio station. The methodologies used are now commonly referred to as co-production of climate information. Such initiatives create more acceptance and ownership of the climate products and encourage uptake and use.

Nganyi forecaster Thomas Osore Omulako demonstrates the process of weather prediction during collaboration. Kenya Meteorological Department through support from ICPAC

The Global Framework for Climate Services of the World Meteorological Organization advocates national governments using a consultative approach that includes multidisciplinary stakeholders to provide climate services. Yet, most scientists are moving from a consensus forecast involving indigenous actors to an objective forecast, which uses only outputs generated by computer models. This move is largely due to stakeholders’ desires for a replicable methodology, which is difficult to achieve with a consensus forecast as indigenous technologies differ from one community to the next, and there still is no clear framework on how to integrate scientific and indigenous knowledge.

Thus, indigenous knowledge practitioners are being excluded from African climatology even though they are critical stakeholders whose capacity should be built and whose participation should be encouraged in producing climate services and adaptation and resilience efforts. The dying practice of indigenous knowledge means that forecasters with the skill level of the Nganyi community are becoming harder to find, impeding inclusion of indigenous practitioners. Many rural communities have lost spiritual sanctions and sanctuaries that protected biodiversity as many leaders abandon their traditional knowledge and heritage. Unlike climate scientists who can monetize their skills, the same is not usually the case for indigenous knowledge practitioners. Concomitantly, a majority of the youth have moved out of rural communities to seek further education and employment opportunities in urban/commercial enterprises. They prefer to move to urban areas in search of employment instead of mastering indigenous knowledge and skills they cannot monetize. Additionally, the exclusion of indigenous knowledge practitioners also has direct implications for the consistency and reliability of “scientific” forecasts due to issues including, but not limited to, data availability.

Integrating Local Knowledge in Climate Discourse

So, how do we include indigenous knowledge into climate change conversations? There is a need to move from speaking on behalf of local communities to giving local communities a voice in contributing to their resilience (ICPAC, 2019). The use of radio has proven to be an important tool in including local communities and indigenous knowledge in conversation on climate information, adaptation and resilience (ICPAC, 2017). It helps in overcoming inadequate infrastructure and the limited human capacity and financial resources of local governments. It also enables the direct engagement of local communities with relevant actors, which helps strengthen community resilience. In many parts of Africa, the use of community radio has proven to be the most effective way to reach vulnerable communities and allow for communities to provide feedback to climate producers and other relevant actors (Faisal & Alhassan, 2017). It enables local government and local communities to begin exchanging ideas and developing resilience strategies relevant to the context.

However, challenges in inclusion efforts vary from country to country. Many African governments still prefer top-down over consultative approaches. In some countries, trust is lacking between the media and the government, making it difficult to use radio to include communities in decision-making processes. The lack of decentralized climate services and limited meteorological staff where local decentralization is available make it impossible to integrate science and indigenous knowledge. As mentioned earlier, the availability of indigenous knowledge is rapidly declining. In areas where it is available, many counties/countries do not have mechanisms in place for the local government to protect the knowledge or for the indigenous practitioners to be compensated for their skill, making it unattractive to future generations. The protection of Nganyi community’s local knowledge is more of an exception than the rule (Communicative Initiative Network, 2015).

While this article focuses largely on how indigenous knowledge can improve the reliability of climate information, there is also a need to preserve local knowledge, including that related to indigenous food systems. This preservation requires “scientific” experts to collaborate with locals to co-create drought-tolerant varieties of indigenous plants; early warning systems to be developed from existing indigenous community structures, especially in countries with weak governance structures; and improved indigenous systems for environmental conservation, land use and water management, to mention but a few.

Conclusion

The benefits of integrating scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge are key to climate knowledge and adaptation strategies (CTA, 2015). The African continent prides itself on a wide range of indigenous knowledge. Documenting, storing and integrating this knowledge into district, national and regional climate planning and response processes can help vulnerable communities adapt to and cope with the rapidly changing climate. However, despite its huge potential to accelerate climate change adaptation, indigenous knowledge remains one of the most underutilized resources in the continent because many people view traditional knowledge as illegitimate and irrelevant. Consequently, indigenous knowledge systems are gradually declining through modernization and development, in part because indigenous knowledge, while scientific in its own right, can be surrounded by myths and superstition.

While the need to preserve indigenous knowledge and integrate it into western scientific knowledge has been recognized, the differences in their paradigms have been cited as the main obstacle to integration. Although both knowledge bases differ, they both try to solve the same problems. Working in complementarity would be a game-changing proposition for Africa.

About the Author

Linda is a climate change adaptation expert with the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre. She has supported the East African region in climate proofing extension services and increasing the access to climate information to the last mile user. Linda Ogallo holds a PhD in climate change and adaptation from the University of Nairobi.