Abstract
Anticipating seasonal and shorter time scale dynamics to farming practices is primordial for indigenous farmers’ resilience under extreme environmental conditions, where climate change is a menace to agro-hydro-ecological systems. This paper assesses the effectiveness of indigenous farmers’ knowledge and aptitude to read weather signs for informed decisions on their daily and seasonal activities. Such climate-proof development is anchored on indigenous people’s knowledge and perceptions in circumstances where the dearth of scientific evidence or information exists as in Cameroon. The study is based on eight focus group discussions and a survey of 597 farming households in seven agro-ecological basins on the Bui Plateau of the Bamenda Highlands. The results indicate that indigenous smallholder farmers value their ability to accurately observe and anticipate local conditions in various ways to serve their local realities more aptly than outside forecasts. Such local knowledge should thus exercise a complementary role weave in a local climate information understanding system that replicates ecological variability.
Highlights
Climate variability and change affects the ability of rural communities to satisfy those needs that are inherent to the environment [1,2,3]
One-third (32.2%) of farmers have very high knowledge of climate change, 54.8% have high knowledge, 4.5% have very low, 5.5% have low, and only 3% have no knowledge
The knowledge is threatened by the processes of urbanization and growth of towns into cities, which attract more migrants from African rural areas into cities and towns, limiting constant refreshment, transmission and or appropriate modification of indigenous knowledge [65]
Summary
Climate variability and change affects the ability of rural communities to satisfy those needs that are inherent to the environment [1,2,3]. The knowledge is relatively cheap, readily available to rural farmers, and it is a climatically smart tool for sustainable development and the management of climate variability [6,7]. Environmental problems vary spatio-temporarily, but rural farmers, through continued experimentation, trial and error, and sustained interactions with their local environment, have developed a vast local knowledge about nature in their locale that they use in coping with and solving their problems, amongst which are climate-related problems [8]. UNESCO has a well-established program on preserving traditional knowledge, called Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, LINKS. This program was one of the key pillars that contributed to the framing of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of poverty eradication and of environmental sustainability. The same program has been expanded and incorporated in the Post-2015 Development
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