Sub-theme
3. Building Resilience for Disaster Prevention and Mitigation
Topic
3-5. Monitoring and early warning of water-related disasters
Body
Sudan is affected by climate variability especially agro-pastoral communities in rural areas and near borders, where a massive infrastructure gap exists due to political marginalization, and civil wars. In Sudan, most agro-pastoral communities lack the literacy to comprehend early warning bulletins and they are overburdened with learning new technologies, while their expertise is rarely taken into account. In consequence, these communities are not reciprocally involved in the disaster risk reduction chain, which exacerbates administrative tensions and undermines climate change adaptation efforts. The overall objective of this study is to develop an early warning system based on indigenous knowledge that considers agro-pastoral communities' expertise in Sudan. The study explores the effectiveness of the existing standard operating procedures for agro-pastoral communities, and whether the indigenous early warning signs are acknowledged in the existing laws and national strategies for disaster risk reduction. The study poses an overarching research question: through what disciplines can indigenous knowledge be mainstreamed in order to create a people-centered early warning system? it also asks: to what extent can indigenous knowledge integration into the national early warning system reduce the relations imbalance between agro-pastoral communities and government for better adaptation to climate variability? In this study, a literature review is conducted to highlight the required reform to the existing legal and institutional framework in order to incorporate indigenous knowledge into the national early warning system. Representatives from both public and private sectors involved in agriculture and livestock development in Sudan were interviewed, and the collected responses were analyzed using Nvivo software for thematic analysis. The theory of change is developed for integrating indigenous knowledge through four main disciplines: education, laws, institutions, and technologies. Respondents ranked the effectiveness of integrating indigenous knowledge relative to specific disciplines, and education was cited as the most important pillar for preserving and utilizing indigenous knowledge for climate variability adaptation. The study indicated that formal education, diversity of social groups, cross-border interoperability challenges, and development priorities remain the greatest threats to indigenous knowledge incorporation. It is recommended to analyze trade-offs between building capacity for agro-pastoral communities and developing a standalone early warning system based on indigenous knowledge prior to integrating indigenous knowledge into the national early warning system. Since climate change undermines indigenous knowledge's reliability, it is conceived to address the importance of validating and updating indigenous knowledge so that it can be envisaged as an innovative driver for biodiversity and disaster risk management.