Abstract
In the Upper Benoue area in Northern Cameroon, narratives about weather events and climate change are different according to one’s economic and cultural profile. Formal education level, economic strategy, and autochthony versus migration are promising explanatory variables to account for the heterogeneity of discourses about climate change.
Weather conditions, especially the timing of rainfall, are highly variable from one year to another in the sahelo soudanian part of Africa. Rationales developed by local stakeholders to account for these variations are based on various sources of knowledge depending on their primary socialization within a local territory and their direct experience of it, their formal schooling and linguistic competence, their faith to monotheist religion, and their commitment to conservation and development programs. Looking across various residents of the same region, this chapter presents differing voices on local changes: global climate change is not necessarily the primary explanation.
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Notes
- 1.
Programme Interdisciplinaire sur les Indicateurs Autochtones de la Flore et de la faune (PIAF) is a project funded by the ANR Young Researcher Program ♯ANR-13-JSH1–0005-01 from 2014 to 2018: http://www.anr-piaf.org. PIAF brings together a research team from 6 research institutes and 10 research laboratories and is coordinated by Anne Sourdril (CNRS, UMR7533 Ladyss).
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This material is based upon work supported by the ANR Young Researcher Program ♯ANR-13-JSH1-0005-01.
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Raimond, C., Bakaira, M., Doua, S.A., Garine, E. (2020). Whose Climate, Whose Changes? Various Views from Rural Northern Cameroon. In: Welch-Devine, M., Sourdril, A., Burke, B. (eds) Changing Climate, Changing Worlds. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37312-2_6
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