Chandni Singh

The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

Developing countries share many common challenges in addressing current and future climate risks. A key barrier to managing these risks is the limited availability of accessible, reliable and relevant weather and climate information. Despite continued investments in Earth System Modelling, and the growing provision of climate services across Africa and India, there often remains a mismatch between available information and what is needed to support on-the-ground decision-making. In this paper, we outline the range of currently available information and present examples from Africa and India to demonstrate the challenges in meeting information needs in different contexts. A review of literature supplemented by interviews with experts suggests that externally provided weather and climate information has an important role in building on local knowledge to shape understanding of climate risks and guide decision-making across scales. Moreover, case studies demonstrate that successful decision-making can be achieved with currently available information. However, these successful examples predominantly use daily, weekly and seasonal climate information for decision-making over short time horizons. Despite an increasing volume of global and regional climate model simulations, there are very few clear examples of long-term climate information being used to inform decisions at sub-national scales. We argue that this is largely because the information produced and disseminated is often ill-suited to inform decision-making at the local scale, particularly for farmers, pastoralists and sub-national governments. Even decision-makers involved in long-term planning, such as national government officials, find it difficult to plan using decadal and multi-decadal climate projections because of issues around uncertainty, risk averseness and constraints in justifying funding allocations on prospective risks. Drawing on lessons learnt from recent successes and failures, a framework is proposed to help increase the utility and uptake of both current and future climate information across Africa and India.

Tracing back to move ahead: a review of development pathways that constrain adaptation futures

Exponents of transformation in the context of climate change strongly articulate the challenges associated with switching from current, potentially maladaptive development trajectories, onto future pathways that are climate responsive. Although scholarship on maladaptation highlights the dangers of path dependency, the concept is under-applied for understanding the potential outcomes of development trajectories that result in what we call an adaptation-constrained space. By conducting case-study analysis based on secondary review, we trace implications of particular development trajectories, in urban and rural India. The first case examines how urbanization in Bangalore city has decreased the capacity to respond to concurrent risks of flooding and water scarcity while the second charts how agricultural policies in India have narrowed local capacity to deal with climatic and non-climatic uncertainties. Using a historical perspective, we identify triggers of change in local and regional development, which have led to an adaptation-constrained space. We find that both pathways display irreversible lock-ins and inherent trade-offs which entrench inequities (through differential capacity and agency to access resources and influence future development). We argue that such development pathways are potentially maladaptive. Whether they are expected to deal with climate impacts or to meet development goals, the fact that they constrain current and future adaptive capacity at multiple levels, is why we consider them maladaptive. As India undertakes large investments in development and climate change adaptation, this paper adds to the relatively low policy debate on how development trajectories, physically and socially, limit the possibilities for future adaptation. We propose that policy-makers and planners first acknowledge how development trajectories acquire dominance, and then begin empowering normative alternatives that open future adaptation options.

Using Life Histories to Understand Temporal Vulnerability to Climate Change in Highly Dynamic Contexts

Climate change research has often been critiqued for focussing on abstract impacts far into the future that are not perceived and understood in the context of daily life. This case proposes the use of life history interviewing as a methodological approach to study how people perceive and negotiate multiple risks to their lives and livelihoods (one of which may be climate variability) in highly dynamic contexts such as dryland areas. The case examines vulnerability to climate change (among other risks) at household and intrahousehold levels to uncover how personal attributes such as caste, age, and gender, as well as contextual factors such as reduced natural resources and socio-political trajectories shape people’s daily lives, their livelihood choices, and aspirations for the future. Using research conducted in two districts in Southern India, I demonstrate how life histories can expand the existing methodological toolkit available to social scientists working on climate change vulnerability and contribute to understanding the temporality inherent in livelihood decisions, the often-intangible aspirations that motivate people’s choices, and how household responses are tapestries of negotiations made within their immediate and larger environment.

The implications of rural perceptions of water scarcity on differential adaptation behaviour in Rajasthan, India

Water scarcity is one of the most critical issues facing agriculture today. To understand how people manage the risk of water scarcity and growing pressures of increased climate variability, exploring perceptions of risk and how these perceptions feed into response behaviour and willingness to adapt is critical. This paper revisits existing frameworks that conceptualise perceptions of environmental risk and decision-making, and uses empirical evidence from an in-depth study conducted in Rajasthan, India, to emphasise how individual and collective memories, and experience of past extreme events shape current definitions and future expectations of climatic risks. In doing so, we demonstrate the value of recognising the role of local perceptions of water scarcity (and how they vary between and within households) in constructing social vulnerability. This expanded understanding of risk perception is critical for incentivising individual adaptation and strengthening local adaptation pathways.