Local perceptions and regional climate trends on the Central…中央的当地认识和区域气候趋势.pdfVIP

land degradation development Land Degrad. Develop. (2008) Published online in Wiley InterScience () DOI: 10.1002/ldr.842 LOCAL PERCEPTIONS AND REGIONAL CLIMATE TRENDS ON THE CENTRAL PLATEAU OF BURKINA FASO C. T. WEST1* 2 AND F. OUATTARA3 , C. RONCOLI 1 Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage, Alaska, USA 2Climate Forecasting and Agricultural Resources Project, University of Georgia, Georgia, USA 3 ´ ´ Direction de la Meteorologie, Burkina Faso, Africa Received 15 January 2007; Revised 30 August 2007; Accepted 31 August 2007 ABSTRACT Due to devastating droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, climatic and environmental change in the West African Sahel has attracted a great deal of scientific research. While many of these studies documented a long-term trend of declining rainfall, analyses conducted in the last few years suggest that a ‘recovery’ is underway. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in two Provinces of the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso, we elicited local perspectives on these rainfall trends from the people who are most directly affected, namely local farmers. Fieldwork revealed that farmers in the research sites perceive that both overall seasonal rainfall and the number of ‘big rains’ during the rainy season have decreased over the last 30 years. We then tested these perceptions against rainfall records from near