CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In South America, the provision of climate services at the regional and local levels is hampered by various challenges such as limited understanding of climate processes (caused in part by the paucity of observations), inadequate dissemination of scientific knowledge, and lack of action on the part of decision makers and human society. To address these challenges, the CLIMAX project, a South American-European initiative, aims to develop innovative monitoring and prediction tools for regional climate in South America and co-produce climate-related knowledge to enhance the social response capacity to climate events that affect agricultural and hydropower sectors.Since 2016, the CLIMAX project has been implementing an interdisciplinary and intersectoral dialogic process in the Bermejo Department, located in the Gran Chaco wetland region in Northern Argentina, to co-produce relevant and useful climate products. The process involves various actors such as the scientific community from climatic and anthropological sciences, small farmers, teachers and students of a rural school, and agents of state agricultural institutions. The approach is structured in "co-production cycles" and one of them aims to create and develop a local hydrological monitoring network (RCBH) for interested social actors. This experience arose in part as a local demand for systematic knowledge of rivers and is based on previous ethnographic fieldwork and other cycles developed in the Bermejo territory, such as the co-production of a community rainfall monitoring network.Until this moment, eight hydrometric rules were built and installed along the rivers associated with significant impact on daily activities. Rules are strategically located in easily accessible places designated by the local community for daily monitoring. Various workshops and meetings are held among the actors to devise the possible monitoring strategies, systematize measurements, and disseminate information to the population of Bermejo. The information is published in a monthly climate bulletin and reported on local radio. Through social networks, the social actors share the observations and the impacts associated with different climate events (e.g., floods or droughts). It has been registered that the overflow of the local rivers can cause flooded roads, deteriorating houses, spoiled crops, and leaving livestock without food. On the other hand, droughts can lead to water scarcity for the population and livestock consumption, and crop irrigation. This information provides a tool for the community to make better decisions based on the impacts generated by different climate events, and thus, the community considers the co-production of RCBH a relevant tool.

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