Abstract
This study assesses the awareness of fishermen and the residents living flood-prone areas of the Gambia on climate change. A 120 year monthly temperature anomaly 0.5Km gridded data for fishing and flooding sites were obtained from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia, UK. Questionnaires were administered on the respondents to ascertain their opinions and perceptions on the effects of climate change. The survey data was analyzed using a pivot table from the Microsoft excel package, and python scripts were developed through the Jupyter notebook to analyze the temperature dataset. A trend test was conducted using Mann Kenell (KD) library in python to identify climate trends and detect climate change over the area under study. The investigated change detection for both temperature and rainfall revealed that, there is no evidence of climate change at flood and fishing sites. The industrial era was found to be 0.02 0C cooler and 19 mm wetter than the pre-industrial era. These differences are way below the IPCC threshold characterizing evidence of climate change. Result obtained did not support the perception of the respondents and residents of both the flood and fishing sites who believed that climate change is responsible for the flooding episodes experienced in their locality. It was also established that there was low awareness of climate change among the respondents. Bad drainage systems were however identified as a major cause of flooding at the flood site. The study therefore recommended that the Gambian government organize climate change awareness programmes.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
CLIMATE CHANGE DETECTION, CLIMATE CHANGE PERCEPTION AND AWARENESS, ANORMALIES
