Climate-Informed Decision-Making in Data-Poor Environments: Managing Climate Risk Through Citizen Science Networks

Abstract

Climate change impacts have become a verifiable reality in most communities in Africa and have already shown its ruthlessness in derailing modest gains made towards sustainable development. While evidence of climate change impacts abounds, especially in key climate-sensitive sectors a, not many people living in affected communities have the requisite knowledge, understanding and capacity to respond to emerging impacts. Most communities in Ghana and Africa, broadly, lack the requisite climate change knowledge resources to inform adaptation choices. Adaptation decision-making, in most cases, is reactive, speculative, and based on flawed understandings and taken-for-granted assumptions of the climate change phenomenon. This is essentially because most countries lack the capacity to make climate-informed decisions, a situation that emerges out of the pervasive lack of efficient climate information services regime. The paucity of climate change knowledge and associated climate information services is undoubtedly an issue of institutional capacity; however, it is also a function of an enduring culture—a poor attitude towards data collection and application—in decision-making processes. Data-poor environment, or data-poverty, as implied in this work, therefore, broadly describes the absence of a data management culture in decision-making processes; it also describes the lack of functional climate information services regime in local communities in Africa and how such omissions impede the ability of countries to make climate-informed decisions. Focusing on Ghana, the paper problematizes the lack of climate information in local communities. The paper argues that Africa’s climate crisis is as much a knowledge and learning challenge which requires new and innovative learning approaches to build capacities to facilitate the making of data-driven and climate-informed adaptation decisions in local communities. The paper, therefore, foregrounds citizen-science networks as avenues for community-focused and community-based climate knowledge co-producing mechanisms.
 
 Received: 23 February 2022 / Accepted: 15 April 2022 / Published: 5 May 2022