African communities' climate knowledge is crucial to adaptation, researchers find
Rural communities across Africa hold accumulated ecological knowledge vital to building effective local climate adaptation strategies, yet this resource remains largely overlooked by policymakers.
East Africa's intensifying climate shocks — droughts, floods, extreme heat, storms and wildfires — are reshaping how governments and communities must plan for survival. More than 58 million people across the wider Horn of Africa faced food insecurity as of early 2024, while some regions saw rainfall deficits of just 30 per cent of normal levels during the October-to-December rains last year. The continent itself is warming at roughly 0.3°C per decade since 1991, faster than the global average.
Yet researchers examining the continent's climate adaptation challenge have identified a significant gap: policymakers are designing responses without adequately tapping the knowledge that rural communities have accumulated through generations of interaction with their environments.
Local knowledge as untapped data
According to recent academic work on soil and climate change in East Africa, the observations gathered by rural communities over time represent a robust source of information for adaptation planning. Researchers refer to this as "local ecological knowledge" — defined as observations accumulated from repeated interactions with a specific place. What gives such knowledge scientific value is not age alone, but its ability to be geographically anchored, cross-checked between different user groups, and compared against instrumental measurements.
"The convergence of observations from the same location, combined with soil data, becomes robust information for analysis and decision-making," according to the research.
A single testimony remains anecdotal. But when multiple observations from different users converge on the same place — reinforced by soil and hydrological data — the picture shifts. This blend of local and scientific data can help governments establish locally relevant reference points for climate adaptation.
Why local knowledge is being missed
Adaptation has become a formal policy priority across East Africa's governments and regional bodies. But current approaches still rely heavily on generic threshold values and reference data that do not reflect the specific conditions of dry zones. The institutional frameworks for disaster response exist in countries like Kenya, Benin and South Africa, yet they operate without the granular local context needed to make them effective.
A major obstacle is the absence of continuous instrumental records. The few soil and hydrological monitoring stations that once existed across the region have been disrupted by political instability, budget cuts and institutional collapse. Without that historical depth, a single measurement cannot anchor a meaningful baseline.
The institutional dimension
Research examining taxation and climate resilience across 25 sub-Saharan African countries between 2011 and 2021 offers a related insight: citizens' willingness to pay taxes — and thus their support for government climate programmes — depends partly on whether they perceive the state as capable, fair and responsive in times of crisis.
Disasters do not affect public trust uniformly. Droughts and extreme temperatures are associated with declining tax morale and lower trust in institutions. Floods, by contrast, correlate with slightly higher tax morale. But repeated exposure to multiple climate shocks overall erodes public confidence. When disasters increase economic inequality, trust in institutions falls further.
Formal disaster management and climate legislation can help. Analysis in Kenya, Benin and South Africa — all highly vulnerable to climate-related disasters — suggests that institutional frameworks can substantially weaken the negative impact of shocks on citizens' fiscal attitudes and support for state-led adaptation.
The path forward
For adaptation strategies to work, policymakers need locally grounded reference points. Rural communities — who have observed shifting weather patterns, soil conditions and seasonal cycles across decades — hold that knowledge. Recognising and integrating these observations into official adaptation frameworks would give governments and development agencies a richer, more locally resonant foundation for building climate resilience.