Acknowledging local climate change experiences is essential for policy reforms
University of Turku
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An aftermath of climate change in coastal Kerala; Ponnani, Malappuram
view moreCredit: P. Afna
New study highlights the importance of lived experience, local knowledge, and community voices in climate change communication. The researchers call for climate policies and communication strategies in the Global South to move beyond broad, one-size-fits-all approaches and instead recognise the lived realities of the communities most exposed to climate change.
While people across the globe are experiencing various impacts of the changing climate, governments and communicators often use top-to-bottom, uniform communication strategies to inform people about climate change.
Challenging the assumptions behind these communication approaches, researchers found evidence that people living in different coastal socio-ecological settings can experience, understand and respond to climate change in different ways, even within a broadly similar geographic and socio-ecological settings. The findings, published in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management, from the coastal region of Kerala within southern India reveal an important gap between awareness of climate change and scientific understanding of its causes.
The researchers studied people’s perceptions, beliefs and knowledge about climate change in two coastal regions, one low-lying island and the other a mainland coast. For example, people from Vypin, a low-lying island, expressed concern about sea-level rise, recurrent flooding, and land subsidence, while people from Kozhikode mainland coast often spoke about declining fish abundance and changes in the size of sardines.
The researchers documented many such accounts, demonstrating that lived experience can provide a detailed understanding of climate change even when people may not use scientific terminologies to describe it. The study also found that people do not interpret climate change solely through scientific explanations. Participants connected climate change with deforestation, pollution, plastic waste disposal, urbanisation, and other local environmental changes. Some also explained climate change through religious and cultural worldviews, including ideas of divine control, punishment or an approaching end of the world. Other misconceptions included the idea that climate change is caused by local environmental issues, such as dumping of plastic waste.
“These perspectives should not simply be dismissed as ignorance; rather, they reveal how communities make sense of a complex and uncertain phenomenon through culturally embedded ways of understanding the world. These different understandings are also suggested to influence people's sense of agency,” says Doctoral Researcher P. Afna from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal.
Afna also points out that some misconceptions about the causes of climate change may create an inflated sense of responsibility among individuals and local communities, who may believe that changing their own behaviour alone can address a problem driven by much larger structural processes. This can potentially shift attention away from the responsibilities of governments, high-emitting sectors, and other powerful actors to provide adaptation support, climate finance, and other forms of assistance.
The findings also show that climate vulnerability is not experienced uniformly. Participants described concerns ranging from livelihood losses and temporary relocation to threats to homes, education, health, and psychological well-being. Some participants expressed fears that rising seas could eventually take their homes, while others considered migration as a possible response to increasing vulnerability.
Importantly, communities were not simply passive victims of climate change. They described a range of responses, including afforestation, reducing plastic pollution, coastal protection, and nature-based approaches. In Vypin, for example, some participants identified mangroves as a means of reducing erosion and protecting settlements, and some had planted mangroves around their homes. The study also found a substantial difference in perceived agency: 65% of participants in Vypin said they could do something to address climate change, compared with 16.25% in Kozhikode.
Rethinking how climate change is communicated
By analysing these results, and comparing it with the current climate change policies in Kerala, India, the researchers argue that climate communication cannot rely only on broad, top-down messages or scientific terminologies. Instead, communication needs to connect scientific knowledge with what people see, experience, and value in their own environments.
“People living at the forefront of climate change already possess important and relevant knowledge about the changes occurring around them. The challenge is to connect this lived experience with scientific understanding without dismissing local knowledge, cultural beliefs or community perspectives,” says Doctoral Researcher Jithin Vijayan from the Department of Biodiversity Sciences, University of Turku in Finland.
The study calls for more place-responsive approaches that bring together scientific knowledge, local and indigenous knowledge systems, community experiences, and diverse cultural worldviews. They recommend locally adapted communication materials, participatory dialogues, experiential education, and the co-production of climate knowledge with communities, with examples. Researchers also suggests a roadmap for implementing the findings within the policy framework.
The study was carried out by a collaborative team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Nature Conservation Foundation-India, and the Department of Biodiversity Sciences, University of Turku, Finland.
Journal
Ocean & Coastal Management
Article Title
Climate knowledge and lived experiences of the unnoticed: Insights from two southern Indian coastal communities for future communication policies
Graphical abstract of the paper
Credit
Jithin Vijayan
Improved climate forecasts alone won’t protect Africa’s poorest farmers
Without practical support, looming El Niño event likely to amplify inequalities
University of Sydney
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Pastoralist Naltwasha Leripe with her goat herd in Samburu, Kenya.
view moreCredit: Photo by Georgina Goodwin. Courtesy of Conservation International
As Africa prepares for the arrival of a powerful El Niño weather event, an international team of researchers led by the University of Sydney and Imperial College London has found that access to improved forecasts alone will not protect many of the region’s poorest livestock farmers from the impacts of climate change.
Published today in Nature Sustainability, the study shows that weather information must be paired with practical “risk-smoothing” measures, such as supplementary livestock feed, drought insurance, targeted financial support or improved market access, so that farmers at risk of losing livestock can act before drought strikes.
By combining improved access to climate information with supported risk-smoothing, livestock farmers can avoid environmental trade-offs that occur when either is used in isolation.
Lead author Dr Matt Clark, a Research Associate in Sustainability Science with the Thriving Oceans Research Hub in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, said climate variability was becoming an “inequity multiplier”.
“If the forecasts prove correct and we see a near-record El Niño develop, we expect this will amplify inequalities across southern African rangelands,” Dr Clark said.
“The problem isn’t that poor farmers don’t have climate information. The problem is they often can’t afford to act on it. Wealthier producers can reduce herd sizes ahead of drought and rebuild when conditions improve. Many small-scale pastoralists simply don’t have that financial buffer.”
Across southern Africa, millions of pastoralists depend on cattle, sheep and goats grazing vast rangelands stretching across Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Livestock are far more than a source of income, they are a family’s savings, food security and cultural identity, often passed down through generations.
As climate change brings more variability between good seasons and severe drought, those communities face increasingly difficult decisions. Wealthier livestock owners can often sell animals before drought, preserve their savings and rebuild their herds when conditions improve. Poorer pastoralists are frequently forced to keep their animals on increasingly stressed landscapes, risking devastating livestock losses that can trap families in poverty.
“It’s not that the people we work with aren’t thinking about adapting to climate change,” said Dr Gina Arena, Science Lead for Herding for Health, Conservation International.
“It’s that with greater uncertainty in climate comes greater risk. We need to help people identify the best decisions and reduce the risk of implementation. Research like this helps us do that,” Dr Arena said.
Applying detailed modelling alongside work with non-government organisations in the field, the researchers found that climate forecasts can become substantially more effective when combined with support that enables households to respond before drought takes hold.
“The encouraging finding is that this isn’t about inventing new technology. It is about applying existing knowledge in new ways,” Dr Clark said.
“Weather forecasting is becoming increasingly accurate. The opportunity now is to make sure those forecasts are paired with practical support so the people who need them most can actually benefit.”
The study suggests this combination of climate information and risk-smoothing can improve livelihoods, reduce inequality and protect rangelands at the same time, overcoming trade-offs that have long challenged climate adaptation programs.
While developed for southern African pastoral systems, Dr Clark said the framework could also help livestock producers in other climate-vulnerable grazing lands, including in Australia.
“The methodology we’ve developed for southern African pastoralists could equally be applied in Australia and other regions facing increasingly variable rainfall. As climate extremes become more common, adaptation needs to be as much about helping people act as improving the forecasts themselves.”
Testing climate adaptation at scale
The researchers developed a model representing pastoral communities across seven southern African countries, drawing on projected rainfall patterns from European climate models together with empirical data on livestock, vegetation and community wealth.
The first simulation represented a business-as-usual future, showing that increasing rainfall variability reduced household wealth, increased livestock losses, degraded grasslands and widened inequality.
The second tested adaptation strategies. Access to forecasts alone delivered only modest benefits because many households lacked the financial capacity to respond, while risk-smoothing measures on their own could force environmental trade-offs.
The third simulation examined how adaptation could spread between neighbouring communities. Based on conservation programs such as Conservation International’s Herding for Health initiative, it showed that when practical support accompanied climate information, communities learned from one another and adoption became self-reinforcing, providing a pathway for climate adaptation at scale.
“It's easy to think of mathematical modelling as abstract, but here it is doing something very practical," said Cosima Fröhner, former Mary Lister McCammon Fellow at Imperial College London. “We simulate the decisions of thousands of individual livestock farmers under different climate conditions and interventions for adaptation. As the model settles into a stable state, the wider patterns and the trade-offs between interventions emerge from all those individual decisions.”
The research was conducted through an international collaboration involving the University of Sydney, Imperial College London, Conservation South Africa, the South African Environmental Observation Network, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of California Merced and the Santa Fe Institute.
Modernised herding practice, Eastern Cape, South Africa.
Credit
Photo by Will McCarry. Courtesy of Conservation International
Lead author Dr Matt Clark from the University of Sydney holding a chameleon on field work in East Africa.
Credit
Photo supplied: University of Sydney
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RESEARCH
Clark, M. et al ‘Minimising climate change adaptation trade-offs in African rangelands’ (Nature Sustainability 2026). DOI: 10.1038/S41893-026-01938-0
DECLARATION
The researchers declare no conflicts of interest. Funding for the study was received from the Leverhulme Trust, Research England and UK Research and Innovation.
Journal
Nature Sustainability
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Minimising climate change adaptation trade-offs in African rangelands
Article Publication Date
14-Sep-2026
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