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Communicating climate information services for benefit of communities

By Peter Makwanya Weather and climate information services play an instrumental role in building community resilience. They prepare communities to counter and absorb climate shocks, enhance agricultural productivity, stay tuned and informed, at the same time contributing to local knowledge and information repository banks. If weather and climate information services do not draw from local experiences and worldview, then their forecasting approach would leave a lot to be desired and local communities, as important stakeholders, would be left out. Getting accurate, people-centred and user-friendly weather and climate information in the languages best understood by communities is fundamentally empowering. This includes communicating weather and climate information broadly using a variety of multimedia communication tools that resonate with the local communities’ standpoint and ideologies. Inclusive in this context are bottom-up, horizontal and two-way communication approaches for enabling the local people to demonstrate sufficient knowledge and information understanding. This is done in order to improve their understanding of sustainable development issues in sufficiently empowering ways. These are areas of interventions that can support empowerment of the poor by enabling the voiceless and the marginalised groups to communicate, share critical and strategic information as well as mobilise others. In this regard, local people share their experiences at the same level, according to their needs, expectations and worldview, in order to attain weather and climate information literacy so that they are able to contribute to sustainable development goals (SDGs). Until weather and climate information services are properly communicated and explained, targeted audience will not be in a position to understand and interpret changes taking place in their localities. Communities need to draw inspiration from their knowledge of weather, early warning systems and environmental impacts on their local landscapes in order to relate the changes they are seeing to climate change. As earlier indicated, this is only possible if reliable and holistic weather and climate information services are readily available to communities to share and interpret. This information becomes strategic and instrumental for climate change adaptations. It is also significant for long and short-term planning for early warning systems and other technologically sound pathways. The main hidden challenge is that the majority of people still have challenges in streamlining weather and climate-related information, which they still confuse. Although these two terms are interlinked and influence one another, weather and climate change are not one and the same thing. Having a clear understanding of weather and climate leads to climate resilient agricultural solutions. While weather refers to short-term conditions such as rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind, floods, hail, among others, weather predictions are about rainfall, temperature, humidity or moisture, among others

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