“Follow the Spiders”: Ecosystems as Early Warnings - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 338

Fig. 18.2 Framework for integrating indigenous and scientifi c knowledge (Adapted from Mercer
et al. ( 2009 ) )
worldviews (Berkes 2009 ). Others argue that the concept of a neat divide between
these two forms of knowledge is false (Briggs 2005 ). For early warning systems,
resolving such epistemological debates is perhaps less important than identifying
accurate signals that people understand and respond to, saving lives and losses from
hazards. As Briggs ( 2005 ) writes:
…in the context of poor communities…information is tested in the context of survival, and
hence is not just true or false in some sort of dispassionate way (as western science might
conclude) but is either more of less effective in providing the means of survival…The real-
ity in rural areas may be much more pragmatic in that farmers and others may, because of
the demands of daily existence, develop a hybrid, mediated knowledge which is developed
and continually re-worked often in highly innovative ways.
A Process Framework has been developed to help communities create hybrid
strategies related to disaster risk reduction (Mercer et al. 2009 ). It could be adapted
for early warning system design (see Fig. 18.2 ). Communities can pick from differ-
ent signals based on their effectiveness, which should be determined through further
study (see Section 18.5 ), or they could even create integrated indexes based on
multiple indicators from different sources.