CreativeDrought - Creative experiments for building resilience to future drought in Africa

干旱事件在许多发展中国家造成严重的水和粮食不安全。其中许多国家的抗旱能力很低，原因多种多样，包括贫穷、不平等的政治和社会结构、获取信息的机会有限，以及传统知识难以适应不断变化的情况。在CreativeDrought项目中，我们的目标是通过将当地土著知识与科学方法相结合来提高抗旱能力。通过多学科的研究团队，我们开发了一种跨学科的方法：i）收集现有的干旱叙述（即关于过去干旱事件的故事）和其他有用的当地知识，ii）利用水文模型制定假设的未来干旱情景（与当地社区核实），iii）组织创造性的实验研讨会，让社区根据叙述和模型情景构建未来的干旱叙述，最后，iv）将这些讲习班的成果纳入地方水管理。这一新方法需要在试点项目中进行测试。我们选择的试点研究地区是津巴布韦南部的Mzingwane地区，这是一个非常贫穷的农村地区，气候干燥和不规则，传统的旱地耕作系统，有效的水管理有限。该区域目前正经历严重干旱，这与连续两个雨季降雨量低于正常水平有关，并对当地社区的粮食和水造成重大影响。我们将进行采访和小组会议，围绕叙事启发，与Mzingwane地区当地社区内的各种团体。通过这种方式，我们将了解干旱事件的经验，观点和文化意义。我们将利用这些知识，通过将叙述的干旱外推到其历史范围之外，利用水文模型制定假设的未来情景。然后，社区可以利用自己的经验和模拟情景，对未来可能发生的干旱事件和可能的有效应对方式进行试验。通过这种试验，他们可以积累应对以往干旱事件范围以外的干旱的经验。这种提高抗旱能力的方法被认为是强有力的，因为它使用科学方法，具有文化基础，而且是自下而上的。它还确保听取和采纳社区不同成员的观点。最后，我们与地方当局合作，确保社区制定的未来干旱叙述将纳入官方决策过程。CreativeDrought项目的团队由来自不同背景的经验丰富的学者组成。虽然有些人以前曾合作过，但该项目还创建了新的链接，并允许团队成员在英国以外的地方应用他们的工作。我们积极建立在团队成员最近和当前的项目上。该团队在不同学科（自然科学和社会科学，艺术和人文科学）之间，国家（英国，津巴布韦）之间以及科学家和当地利益相关者（社区成员，非政府组织和当局）之间建立桥梁。为了提高项目的成功率，我们将与同一领域的现有项目建立联系，并成立一个国际科学指导委员会。这项研究的成果多种多样，包括与当地利益相关者举行会议和研讨会，出版高级别科学出版物，建立一个网站来传播结果和存档收集的数据，以及一项旨在将我们新的跨学科方法应用于非洲和世界其他案例研究领域的提案。通过CreativeDrought项目，我们希望通过将当地知识和文化表现形式的优势与科学方法相结合，为提高发展中国家农村社区抗旱能力的新方法奠定基础。

Drought events cause severe water and food insecurities in many developing countries. In many of these countries resilience to drought is low for a myriad of reasons, including poverty, unequal political and social structures, limited access to information, and problems adapting traditional knowledge to changing situations. In the CreativeDrought project we aim to increase drought resilience by combining local indigenous knowledges with scientific methods. With a multi-disciplinary research team, we developed an interdisciplinary approach that: i) collects existing drought narratives (i.e. stories about past drought events) and other useful local knowledges, ii) develops hypothetical future drought scenarios with a hydrological model (verified with local communities), iii) organises creative experimentation workshops in which communities build future drought narratives based on the narratives and model scenarios, and finally, iv) embeds the outcomes of these workshops in local water management. This new approach needs to be tested in a pilot project. The pilot study area we have selected is the Mzingwane area in southern Zimbabwe, a very poor rural area, with a dry and irregular climate, traditional dryland farming systems, and limited effective water management. The region is currently experiencing a severe drought, related to below normal rainfall in two consecutive rainy seasons, and leading to major impacts on local communities in terms of food and water. We will conduct interviews and group sessions, based around narrative elicitation, with various groups within local communities in the Mzingwane area. In this way we will learn about the experience, perspective and cultural significance of drought events. We will build on this knowledge to develop hypothetical future scenarios with a hydrological model by extrapolating the narrated droughts to outside their historic range. The communities can then use their own experience and the modelling scenarios to experiment with stories about possible future drought events and possible effective ways of responding to them. Through this experimentation they can build up experience of dealing with droughts that are outside the range of previous drought events. This way of increasing resilience to drought is regarded as robust because it uses scientific methods, is culturally embedded and bottom-up. It also ensures that the perspectives of different members of the community are heard and incorporated. Finally, we work with local authorities to make sure the future drought narratives that the communities have developed will feed into official decision-making processes.The team of the CreativeDrought project consists of experienced academics from different backgrounds. While some have collaborated before, the project also creates new links and allows team members to apply their work outside the UK. We actively build on recent and current projects of the team members. The team builds bridges between different disciplines (natural and social sciences, arts & humanities), between countries (UK, Zimbabwe), and between scientists and local stakeholders (community members, NGOs and authorities). To increase success of the project, we will link up with existing projects in the same area and have an international scientific steering committee.The outcomes of this research are diverse, including meetings and workshops with local stakeholders, high-level scientific publications, a website to disseminate results and archive collected data, and a proposal that aims at applying our new interdisciplinary approach to other case study areas in Africa and around the world. With the CreativeDrought project we hope to lay the foundations for new ways of increasing the drought resilience of rural communities in developing countries, by combining strengths of local knowledge and cultural expressions with scientific methods.