Climate information communication is crucial to understand climate as a major influence, to recognize risks and to take informed responses
Communities and practitioners in Sub-Sahara Africa, who operate in risky and unpredictable environments, have to make decisions with very limited climate information available to them.
Even though several community-based adaptations (CBAs) are increasingly recognized as successful approach, the poor or absolute lack of access to climate information remains a major challenge in understanding and assessing climate risks in developing countries like Ethiopia. Climate information from scientific sources is often viewed as overly scientific and complex, whereas information from local knowledge is not widely appreciated.
This innovative project will be a community based approach and seeks to empower communities, local governments and service providers via harnessing relevant and simplified climate information.
The project will contribute to the process of reducing vulnerabilities of rural communities, households and individuals to climate variability by enabling them to understand and analyze the changes taking place and the threats posed to their livelihoods.
This initiative is based on the following basic assumptions;
- The language, style and channel through which climate information communication is done are important factors that make such information useable for adaptive/social learning and CBA.
- Climate change information should be easily accessible and available in a simplified and useable manner based on local priorities
- A well informed decision making is central for designing and implementing appropriate response at different levels
-Continued social learning is crucial for ‘bottom up’ approaches to succeed in a sustainable manner
Therefore, this project aims to foster understanding and trust between science and local knowledge, and to the build local capacity to understand, interpret and use available climate information.