Transforming Climate Knowledge with and for Society: mobilising knowledge on climate variability with communities in northeast Bangladesh

The communities of Sylhet Division, in northeast Bangladesh, live with a unique local climate, with particularly high rainfall in the summer pre-monsoon period. But there are significant uncertainties about the causes and impacts of this rain, and these communities are highly vulnerable to changes to this rainfall. TRACKS brought together 19 scientists from Norway and Bangladesh to collaborate with Sylhet communities on a study of their summer rainfall, and what it means to them. We worked closely with 48 local "citizen scientists" to map the causes and impacts of this rain, and the gaps in our knowledge. Together we designed ways of studying these knowledge gaps, with the citizen scientists themselves conducting measurements around the places they live for two years. They studied things like temperature, rainfall, river levels, whether frogs croak before rainfall, if mango trees predict wet summers, or how many people are killed by thunderstorms each year, for example. In parallel, climate scientists tried to fill these knowledge gaps by looking at the records of local rainfall, and the ways climate models represent this rain. At the end of TRACKS we assessed the project's impact on the citizen scientists and found that they were all more aware of the climate, had learned a lot about climate, and were able to use this learning in better adapting the ways they work and live. We found that the project had set up a strong local network of citizen scientists, and that their work is helping to inform local government decisions about how to prepare for, and deal with the impacts of, flash floods.

We evaluated the projects impact on the extended peer community relative to how it supported their adaptation decisions, based on five stocks of capital. See the Results Report. We found significant increases in human capital. All respondents said they learned a lot and most told how they used things they learned at work and in daily life. We found a significant increase in social capital. A network was created, where most trusted each other and spoke freely. Citizen scientists all participated over a full year. We found a moderate increase in political capital. Project information was shared with politicians, and sometimes supported local government decisions. We found a moderate increase in technological capital: People said they benefited from using weather-measuring technology. We found a low increase in institutional capital: TRACKS did not do enough to link to other institutions but we saw impacts in institutions where citizen scientists worked.

The TRACKS project aims to study how a community can mobilise high-quality knowledge in support of local climate change adaptation, with a focus on communities in northeast Bangladesh. The focus on Bangladesh reflects its high vulnerability and the intern ational community's commitments to invest in building adaptive capacity in developing countries. Adaptation in northeast Bangladesh is particularly hampered by significant uncertainty and contentiousness about local climate variability and its impacts on local communities, and has been the focus of Norwegian climate science that TRACKS will build on. Starting from philosophy of science, this project offers a perspective on knowledge mobilisation as a social and political process, and seeks to frame this p rocess according to an innovative post-normal science approach, supported by an interdisciplinary consortium. Notably, TRACKS seeks to embed climate science in a social process that also brings together local and traditional knowledge as an extended peer community, to negotiate which knowledge is of the best quality for supporting adaptation in northeast Bangladesh. This approach aspires to produce high quality knowledge on current climate variability, while building capacity within the community to engag e with different knowledge systems, including science, for better informed adaptation to future climate change. It also hopes to contribute to the practice and scholarship of community-based adaptation with a toolbox of innovative approaches. TRACKS will give effect to a post-normal science approach using three innovative methods, to ground climate science in its context and bridge the boundaries separating knowledge systems: (1) Narrative concepts; (2) Mediated modelling; and (3) Co-constructed indicator s for measuring climate variability and its impacts. Giving effect to these methods demands interdisciplinary collaboration, both between natural and social sciences and between Norwegian and Bangladeshi partners.