Highlighting Avenues to Reconcile Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge to Address Climate Change and Land Degradation in Lesotho: A Case Study of the Maseru District

Abstract

While indigenous knowledge (IK) has played an instrumental role in enabling sub-Saharan African farmers to adapt to changing environments for decades, it is often perceived as inferior to scientific knowledge. Hence, there is a need for comparisons between IK and scientific knowledge that would allow for a complementary usage rather than a focus on their differences. This chapter seeks to analyse the indigenous indicators farmers in Maseru district in the eastern part of the Kingdom of Lesotho use to adapt to climate change and land degradation. In so doing, the chapter explores avenues that would facilitate IK and scientific knowledge integration to scale up adaptation to climate change and ensure effective land management against degradation. Thirty farmers were identified for this purpose and they were interviewed to gather their perspectives on climate change and land degradation. Although farmers are aware of the problems, their efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change seem futile. This chapter sheds some light on how IK and scientific knowledge could be integrated to produce more locally relevant solutions to climate change adaptations in Lesotho. The findings are discussed with regards to how they could assist in scaling up the achievement of the United Nation’s 13th sustainable development goal in Lesotho.