A new paper “Weather and climate information services for pastoralists: A review” has just been published in the journal Climate Services. The paper was authored by Katharine Vincent, Simon Mercer, Ellen Reid, Claire Bedelian and Sarah Opitz-Stapleton and produced as part of the Supporting Pastoralism in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC) programme.
The paper reviews the state of knowledge on pastoralist weather and climate information services (WCIS) through a scoping review. The review generated 51 papers published between 2000 and 2024 covering multiple regions, but with 80% focusing on Africa. It finds that papers address various aspects of WCIS, with particular focus on users. Themes for which there are evidence include the role of indigenous and scientific forecasting, identifying user needs, how to generate and communicate information in such a way as to encourage use, risk perceptions and use of WCIS, including the benefits.
The evidence base is small but growing, and there is some commonality of themes with other fields. Challenges persist in how to generate and effectively communicate salient, credible and legitimate information. The particularly strong focus on indigenous and scientific forecasts highlights the importance of indigenous knowledge to many pastoralist communities and raises questions about how best to integrate knowledge types. Future research directions in pastoralist WCIS, like in other fields, are likely to cover issues such as evaluation and sustainability, and also how WCIS can support other adaptation and risk reduction efforts.