Perceiving Risk Perceptions: Local Adaptation to Climate Related Hazards in Ghana

Adaptation is widely recognized as a pivotal strategy to counter the negative impacts of climate change. Climate related hazards such as droughts, rainfall variability and heat waves are furthermore increasingly attributed to global climatic changes and may directly affect the livelihood of people dependent on the climate. Whilst global knowledge on climate change is appraised at the policy-science interface, the locality of hazardous climatic occurrences should receive more attention. Views at the community level may entail repercussions for effective measures to prevent hazardous climate events from gravely impacting. It is therefore important to take acknowledgement of local responses to climate change and the likelihood of adaptation measures. This work has aimed to map the risk perceptions towards climate change of local farmers in a developing country. A fieldwork research in a river basin in Ghana has been carried out to qualify climate related hazards, to understand vulnerability towards climatic perturbations, to collect these risk perceptions through a questionnaire and to conceptualize adaptation strategies from the perspective of local farming communities.