Abstract
Climate-related hazards like drought are associated with loss of life and lead to food insecurity in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Food insecurity, which affects more than 220 million sub-Saharan Africans, manifests as starvation that leads to more than 50% of children under the age of 5-years presenting as underweight for age in many communities on the continent. This household survey reports the means by which rural fisher folk and farming communities in Uganda gained access to early warning meteorological information. The survey covered five districts across different climatic zones in Uganda and recruited a total of 405 respondents with an average age of 41 years (SD 16). Economic activity was used to categorize each of the five districts into farming (crops and livestock) and fishing areas. The results showed that most respondents were unaware of drought as one of the climate-related hazards. Compared to respondents from the fishing communities, the respondents from farming communities were more likely to be receiving weather-related information (P-value < 0.01). There were 204/405 (50.37%) female respondents who, compared to male respondents, were less likely to have access to weather information, less willing to pay for weather information, and less likely to have and or own devices like a radio for receiving weather information. The survey demonstrated that: 1) there were gaps in the knowledge about climate-related hazards, 2) there is a need for additional interventions targeting fisher folk communities access timely weather information, and 3) introducing user paid access to weather information may increase climate-related gender-based disparities.
Highlights
Climate-related hazards like drought are known to cause loss of life and livelihood of communities that depend on rain-fed agriculture (Akwango, Obaa, Turyahabwe, Baguma, & Egeru, 2017; Shiferaw et al, 2014)
Elsewhere it has been noted that the nature and occupation of the fisher folk may leave them less psychologically aware of how closely climate change affects them as individuals and as a community compared to the farmers (Sinha & Das, 2019; Steynor & Pasquini, 2019)
The respondents, mainly farmers and fisher folks were interested mostly in the impact of the weather and climate on their direct activities and not even on the extreme climate change effects such as drought and floods in the community at large. Issues such as food insecurity which leads to underweight in children especially those under five were not well recognized by the respondents
Summary
Climate-related hazards like drought are known to cause loss of life and livelihood of communities that depend on rain-fed agriculture (Akwango, Obaa, Turyahabwe, Baguma, & Egeru, 2017; Shiferaw et al, 2014). This is especially true for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where drought is identified as one of the leading causes of food insecurity (Shiferaw et al, 2014). The challenge remains that farmers, fishermen and community support institutions in Uganda receive little or no relevant information to help them cope with droughts, floods and other climatic stresses. This study set out to determine the means by which rural fisher folk and farming communities in Uganda gained access to early warning meteorological information
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