Rural Response to Climate Change: A Lessons-learned from Indonesia

Abstract

"Changes in climate provides new unexpected and uncertain phenomena for farmers to adapt their farming strategies. Relying on past experience only would not help farmers to anticipate the future climate situation. Observation on the present problems of farming strategies in relation to changes in weather condition needs to be improved significantly, so as to enable them to develop their farming strategies better and to reinterprete their cosmologies. The cases from Indonesia (Yogyakarta and West Java) reveal the advantages the farmers gained by enriching their exisiting knowledge through detailed daily rainfall measurement and agroecosystem observation. Farmers, however, faced some constraints in organizing their activities through collection action in carrying out the observation and addressing vulnerability based on water management and availability as common pool resources. The paper examines the process of facilitating farmers to be rainfall-observers in their own fields, its benefits to their knowledge and practical advancement, as well as the constraints the farmers and researchers had in building up a collaborative research and addressing farmers’ vulnerability in a changing climate."