scholarly journals Fishers’ Perceptions and Attitudes toward Weather and Climate Information Services for Climate Change Adaptation in Senegal

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9465
Author(s):  
Ndèye Seynabou Diouf ◽  
Issa Ouedraogo ◽  
Robert B. Zougmoré ◽  
Madické Niang

Climate variability has become a major issue for vital sectors in the context of climate change. In fisheries, in particular, the effects of climate change are reflected in the decline of fishing yield and loss of lives during extreme weather events in the sea. This study analyzed the perception of climate variability and change by fisher-folks, the attitude of fisher-folks toward the weather forecast and the adoption rate of the use of the weather forecast as well as the factors determining its use in Senegal. To this end, 576 fisher-folks belonging to 41 local fishing committees along the coastal areas were surveyed and focus group discussions were organized with key informants. The adoption rate was identified using the method of the average treatment effect (ATE) and the test of independency (chi-square) was used to analyze the perceptions of and beliefs on climate change. The results showed that 96% of fisher-folks perceive the change in the climate, though the effects are differently appreciated across the coastline. The most frequently observed effects are: coastal erosion, change in wind direction, increase in extreme swells and sea level rise. Nearly half of fisher-folks confirm that they noticed these changes over the past five years. In the Southern Coast in particular, 40% of fisher-folks stated that these changes happened 10 years ago. This statement is confirmed by the qualitative data. More than 90% of the respondents ascertain the weather forecast before going to fish, 63% regularly receive the weather forecast and 53% avoid going to sea during extreme events. In addition, the results showed that if the weather forecast was made accessible to the majority of fisher-folks, more than 83% would avoid going to sea during periods of extreme weather extreme events, thus reducing significantly the number of fatalities. The best way to protect the fisher-folks from the harmful effects of climate change is to ensure large-scale access to and use of accurate weather forecasts.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0244512
Author(s):  
Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz ◽  
Meredith T. Niles

Understanding how perceptions around motivation, capacity, and climate change’s impacts relate to the adoption of adaptation practices in light of experiences with extreme weather events is important in assessing farmers’ adaptive capacity. However, very little of this work has occurred in islands, which may have different vulnerabilities and capacities for adaptation. Data of surveyed farmers throughout Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (n = 405, 87% response rate) were used in a structural equation model to explore the extent to which their adoption of agricultural practices and management strategies was driven by perceptions of motivation, vulnerability, and capacity as a function of their psychological distance of climate change. Our results show that half of farmers did not adopt any practice or strategy, even though the majority perceived themselves capable and motivated to adapt to climate change, and understood their farms to be vulnerable to future extreme events. Furthermore, adoption was neither linked to these adaptation perceptions, nor to their psychological distance of climate change, which we found to be both near and far. Puerto Rican farmers’ showed a broad awareness of climate change’s impacts both locally and globally in different dimensions (temporal, spatial, and social), and climate distance was not linked to reported damages from Hurricane Maria or to previous extreme weather events. These results suggest that we may be reaching a tipping point for extreme events as a driver for climate belief and action, especially in places where there is a high level of climate change awareness and continued experience of compounded impacts. Further, high perceived capacity and motivation are not linked to actual adaptation behaviors, suggesting that broadening adaptation analyses beyond individual perceptions and capacities as drivers of climate adaptation may give us a better understanding of the determinants to strengthen farmers’ adaptive capacity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ralph Peter Titmuss

<p>As a result of climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more common around the world. Coupled with the ever-present threat of sea level rise that coastal cities face there is a potential for far more severe weather events to occur. This thesis will seek to understand how an existing city can adapt to a more hostile environment, and how in the event of an extreme weather occurrence it maintains its function. There is an urgent need to understand how a city can respond when faced with these situations. Previous extreme weather events, Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and extreme flooding around the world, highlight the danger of a lack of preparedness and resilience found in most cities.  The purpose of this thesis is to understand how the concept of a core shelter, as a way to address the threats of extreme weather events, can be applied to a well-established urban context, Wellington NZ. A core shelter is a structure that in the event of a large-scale disaster, protects its users, and post-disaster still reaches permanent housing standards without being deemed to be a permanent dwelling. It will also look at whether it is possible to create areas in an existing city that can be considered “safe havens” in the event of an extreme natural incident.  This thesis outlines the need for these shelters by identifying the potential threats of climate change in a Wellington context, and by understanding the vulnerability of Wellington’s current building stock. It reaches a conclusion that through the implementation of core shelters in Wellington NZ, resilience will be improved, disaster response efforts will be aided, and destruction arising from extreme weather events will be reduced. In addition, it identifies the areas of Wellington that are deemed to be of higher risk in a disaster or extreme weather event, analyses an existing building’s potential to become a community resilience/core shelter, and proposes a custom building that could be built on Leeds St and Ghuznee St.</p>


Author(s):  
Peter J. Webster ◽  
Jun Jian

The uncertainty associated with predicting extreme weather events has serious implications for the developing world, owing to the greater societal vulnerability to such events. Continual exposure to unanticipated extreme events is a contributing factor for the descent into perpetual and structural rural poverty. We provide two examples of how probabilistic environmental prediction of extreme weather events can support dynamic adaptation. In the current climate era, we describe how short-term flood forecasts have been developed and implemented in Bangladesh. Forecasts of impending floods with horizons of 10 days are used to change agricultural practices and planning, store food and household items and evacuate those in peril. For the first time in Bangladesh, floods were anticipated in 2007 and 2008, with broad actions taking place in advance of the floods, grossing agricultural and household savings measured in units of annual income. We argue that probabilistic environmental forecasts disseminated to an informed user community can reduce poverty caused by exposure to unanticipated extreme events. Second, it is also realized that not all decisions in the future can be made at the village level and that grand plans for water resource management require extensive planning and funding. Based on imperfect models and scenarios of economic and population growth, we further suggest that flood frequency and intensity will increase in the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Yangtze catchments as greenhouse-gas concentrations increase. However, irrespective of the climate-change scenario chosen, the availability of fresh water in the latter half of the twenty-first century seems to be dominated by population increases that far outweigh climate-change effects. Paradoxically, fresh water availability may become more critical if there is no climate change.


Water ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Havens ◽  
Hans Paerl ◽  
Edward Phlips ◽  
Mengyuan Zhu ◽  
John Beaver ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-23
Author(s):  
Ayansina Ayanlade ◽  
Stephen M. Ojebisi

Abstract The study examines the seasonality in climate and extreme weather events, and its effect on cattle production in the Guinea Savannah ecological zone of Nigeria. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Climate data of 34 years were used to examine the trends in rainfall pattern and climate variability while household survey was used to appraise the herders’ awareness of climate variability/change impacts and adaptation strategies. Cumulative Departure Index (CDI) method was used to assess the extreme weather events while descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic (MNL) regression model were used to identify the factors that determined herders’ adaptation strategies to climate change. The results revealed a significant spatiotemporal variation in both rainfall and temperature with CDI ranging from -1.39 to 3.3 and -2.3 to 1.81 respectively. The results revealed a reduction in the amount of water available for cattle production. From survey results, 97.5% of the herders identified drought as the major extreme weather event affecting livestock productivities in the study region. In the herder’s perception, the droughts are more severe in recent years than 34 years ago. The results from MNL revealed that extreme weather events, such as drought, has a positive likelihood on migration, at a 10% level of significance, the events has led to migration of cattle herders from the northern part of the study area toward the southern part in recent years.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Nicholls ◽  
Lisa Alexander

In 1990 and 1992 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its first assessment of climate change and its supplement, did not consider whether extreme weather events had increased in frequency and/or intensity globally, because data were too sparse to make this a worthwhile exercise. In 1995 the IPCC, in its second assessment, did examine this question, but concluded that data and analyses of changes in extreme events were ‘not comprehensive’and thus the question could not be answered with any confidence. Since then, concerted multinational efforts have been undertaken to collate, quality control, and analyse data on weather and climate extremes. A comprehensive examination of the question of whether extreme events have changed in frequency or intensity is now more feasible than it was 15 years ago. The processes that have led to this position are described, along with current understanding of possible changes in some extreme weather and climate events.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Lauri Peterson

Long-standing meteorological research has established that anthropogenic climate change increases the risk and intensity of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones, floods, and forest fires. However, comparatively little is known about the impact of such events on policy ambition. Studies on the topic emerged only recently and tend to focus on individual country cases. A comprehensive cross-country perspective is still missing. This article addresses the gap in the literature using large-scale analyses on the basis of country-level data from 2008 to 2017. The findings indicate that extreme weather events propel only highly functioning democracies to tackle climate change. Effects among remaining country cases are insignificant. This variation in the data can be attributed to democracies’ concern for the common good and the perspectives of those most affected by climate-related disasters.


Author(s):  
Ramona A. Duchenne-Moutien ◽  
Hudaa Neetoo

Throughout these past decades, climate change has featured among one of the most complex global issues. Characterized by worldwide alterations in weather patterns, along with a concomitant increase in the temperature of the Earth, climate change will undoubtedly have significant effects on food security and food safety. Climate change engenders climate variability, which are significant variations in weather variables and in their frequency. Both climate variability and climate change are thought to threaten the safety of the food supply chain through different pathways. One such pathway is their ability to exacerbate foodborne diseases by influencing the occurrence, persistence, virulence and, in some cases, toxicity of certain groups of disease-causing microorganisms. Food safety can also be compromised by various chemical hazards such as pesticides, mycotoxins and heavy metals. With changes in weather patterns such as lower rainfall, higher air temperature and higher frequency of extreme weather events amongst others, this translates to emerging food safety concerns. These include shortage of safe water for irrigation of agricultural produce, greater use of pesticides due to pest resistance, increased difficulty in achieving a well-controlled cold chain resulting in temperature abuse, or occurrence of flash floods which cause run-off of chemical contaminants in natural water courses. Together, these can result in foodborne infection, intoxication, antimicrobial resistance and long-term bioaccumulation of chemicals and heavy metals in the human body. Furthermore, severe climate variability can result in extreme weather events and natural calamities, which directly or indirectly impair food safety. This review discusses the causes and impacts of climate change and variability on existing as well as emerging food safety risks, and also considers mitigation and adaptation strategies to address the global warming and climate change problem.


Author(s):  
D.B. Kiktev ◽  
◽  
E.N. Kruglova ◽  
I.A. Kulikova ◽  
A.V. Muravev ◽  
...  

The automatic identification of objects associated with various extreme weather events (EWE) on seasonal and intraseasonal timescales is done based on surface air temperature and precipitation datasets (NCEP/NCAR daily reanalysis fields for the Northern Hemisphere). Some features of the spatial and temporal variability of the extreme characteristics of temperature and precipitation regimes are considered in the context of climate change. An inventory of extreme events is carried out for the Northern Hemisphere in 1981–2019 depending on the spatial extent, duration, and intensity of EWEs. The years with the most striking events are noted, and a brief description of their specific features is given. The results will be used to analyze the EWE predictability in the context of the verification of long-range weather forecasts. Keywords: extreme weather events, climate change, identification of extreme events, long-range weather forecasts


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coline Poppeschi ◽  
Guillaume Charria ◽  
Eric Goberville ◽  
Peggy Rimmelin-Maury ◽  
Nicolas Barrier ◽  
...  

Extreme weather events affect coastal marine ecosystems. The increase in intensity and occurrence of such events drive modifications in coastal hydrology and hydrodynamics. Here, focusing on the winter period (from December to March), we investigated multi-decade (2000–2018) changes in the hydrological properties of the Bay of Brest (French Atlantic coast) as an example of the response of a semi-enclosed bay to extreme weather episodes and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. The relationships between extreme weather events and severe low salinity conditions (as a proxy for changes in water density) were investigated using high-frequency in situ observations and high-resolution numerical simulations. The identification of intense episodes was based on the timing, duration, and annual occurrence of extreme events. By examining the interannual variability of extreme low salinity events, we detect a patent influence of local and regional weather conditions on atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns, precipitation, and river runoff. We revealed that low salinity events in Brittany were controlled by large-scale forcings: they prevailed during the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation and periods of low occurrences of the Atlantic Ridge weather regime. The increase in severe storms observed in western France since 2010 has led to a doubling of the occurrence and duration of extreme low salinity events in Brittany.


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