How can a villager in Ethiopia, at the mercy of the climate’s eccentricities, get to know what is happening to the precious rain in her part of the world, and how best to deal with it?

Climate change is already affecting the amount of rainfall a continent or a country receives, but making in-formation available at the daily living level is critical to helping communities develop strategies to adapt, as most of them rely heavily on rain for food and livelihoods.

Such information is rare; more often there is none, but this may soon change. “How about a rainfall calen-dar for communities?” thought two climate change researchers - Cynthia Awuor, of Care, an international hu-manitarian NGO, and Anne Hammill, of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), a Canada-based policy research institute.The calendar they developed was piloted in May/June 2009 in Kala-baydh village in Ethiopia’s Somali region.

It is also a “tool” to help develop the community’s perceptions of rainfall patterns, and provides a “platform to discuss risk management strategies to help them adapt”, said Awuor.

The calendar “clarifes” the “consequences of the changes in rainfall patterns on livelihoods”, and can help researchers and policy-makers develop appropriate projects.

A community or village plots the amount of rain it received each month for the past three to fve years in the calendar, “depending on how accurately they can recall”, said Awuor.

Communities can even plot rain-fall information for specifc weeks or seasons, using a scale ranging from “little/below normal” through “aver-age/normal” to “heavy/normal”, and can also use any available local meteorological records to make the cal-endar more accurate.

The Kalabaydh villagers discovered local variations in rainfall after plotting their calendar. “Some loca-tions within the area receive comparatively higher rainfall than others in given seasons, and this results in a higher concentration of livestock in such areas, and the potential for the rapid spread of livestock diseases” the researchers said.

They noted that the villagers had been resorting to short-term measures like depending on food aid, and selling frewood and charcoal to get by; many had been forced to migrate.

The older men pointed out that in the past 10 years it had been getting drier and warmer in their village, as the calendar prompted the commu-nity to discuss the issues and refect on long-term strategies, one of which was that the government should help them build reservoirs and tap available groundwater.

Since the Ethiopian pilot, Care and IISD have helped communities in Uganda and Kenya develop a similar calendar, allowing them to defne the relationship between changing rainfall patterns and pasture availability, livestock productivity, duration of migration and access to markets.