Convener: Carla Mooney (Bureau of Meteorology, Australia), Lina Rodriguez (World Meteorological Organization), Julio C. Postigo (Indiana University Bloomington, United States of America)
Indigenous peoples have place-and culture-specific approaches to interpreting the weather in their homelands. Nuanced indicators and specialized language are used by Indigenous peoples around the world to monitor their environments and guide daily and seasonal activities. For many communities, local observations and forecasts based on personal experience and shared amongst knowledgeable land users constitute the most locally relevant, accessible, and reliable sources of weather information when it comes to identifying and responding to extreme weather variations.At larger spatial and temporal scales, National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) provide weather and climate forecasts, warnings, and advisory services based on Western Science. NMHSs products inform specific user groups resulting in an enormous number of decisions by individuals, economic sectors, and governments in most countries around the world. However, significant challenges exist in terms of provision of weather information that effectively addresses the needs of Indigenous communities at local and regional scales.There is a somewhat of a disconnect between how NMHSs and other service providers develop and share forecasts, and how Indigenous communities are able to interpret and use these forecasts to support decision-making in daily activities.Recently, co-production of knowledge has shown that bringing together knowledge of all the stakeholders (e.g., scientists, practitioners, end-users, donors) has enormous potential for transitions to sustainability. In this session, we focus on local knowledge as a crucial component of knowledge co-production that encompasses indigenous, traditional, ecological knowledge, as well as the knowledge of local peoples. In doing so, we focus on the body of knowledge produced and used by individuals and communities for informing their livelihoods. Further, this illuminates important elements for co-production such as the way knowledge is generated, circulated, contested, adjusted.By learning more about Indigenous approaches to observing and forecasting weather and related environmental conditions there is an opportunity to extend understanding of weather and climate for the broader meteorological community.Finally, depending on the number of abstracts and the interests of the author we may explore possibilities for publishing papers.We welcome abstracts on but not limited to:
Indigenous perspectives on the usefulness of current weather, water, ice and climate forecasts to meeting local daily and seasonal information needs
Traditional ways of forecasting and responding to extreme weather events
Insights into how to increase the reach or weather products and services to diverse and remote communities
Approaches to effectively bring together Indigenous environmental observation practices and community-based monitoring to inform long-term understanding of weather patterns and change
