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Abstract People’s observations of climate change and its impacts, mediated by cultures and capacities, shape adaptive responses. Adaptation is critical in regions of rainfed smallholder agriculture where changing rainfall patterns have disproportionate impacts on livelihoods, yet scientific climate data to inform responses are often sparse. Despite calls for better integration of local knowledge into adaptation frameworks, there is a lack of empirical evidence linking both smallholder climate observations and scientific data to on-farm outcomes. We combine smallholder observations of past seasonal rainfall timing with satellite-based rainfall estimates in Uganda to explore whether farmers’ ability to track climate patterns is associated with higher crop yields. We show that high-fidelity tracking, or alignment of farmer recall with recent rainfall patterns, predicts higher yields in the present year, suggesting that farmers may translate their cumulative record of environmental knowledge into productive on-farm decisions, such as crop selection and timing of planting. However, tracking of less-recent rainfall (i.e., 1–2 decades in the past) does not predict higher yields in the present, while climate data indicate significant trends over this period toward warmer and wetter seasons. Our findings demonstrate the value of smallholder knowledge systems in filling information gaps in climate science while suggesting ways to improve adaptive capacity to climate change.
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Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture
It has been proposed that climate adaptation research can benefit from an evolutionary approach. But related empirical research is lacking. We advance the evolutionary study of climate adaptation with two case studies from contemporary United States agriculture. First, we define ‘cultural adaptation to climate change’ as a mechanistic process of population-level cultural change. We argue this definition enables rigorous comparisons, yields testable hypotheses from mathematical theory and distinguishes adaptive change, non-adaptive change and desirable policy outcomes. Next, we develop an operational approach to identify ‘cultural adaptation to climate change’ based on established empirical criteria. We apply this approach to data on crop choices and the use of cover crops between 2008 and 2021 from the United States. We find evidence that crop choices are adapting to local trends in two separate climate variables in some regions of the USA. But evidence suggests that cover cropping may be adapting more to the economic environment than climatic conditions. Further research is needed to characterize the process of cultural adaptation, particularly the routes and mechanisms of cultural transmission. Furthermore, climate adaptation policy could benefit from research on factors that differentiate regions exhibiting adaptive trends in crop choice from those that do not. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2019470
- PAR ID:
- 10516505
- Publisher / Repository:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Volume:
- 378
- Issue:
- 1889
- ISSN:
- 0962-8436
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0397
