Climate Crowd on the Ground

Climate Crowd On The Ground is a compilation of 15 Climate Crowd projects implemented in 8 countries, helping to build the resilience of people and nature to a changing climate. These projects are informed, designed, and implemented hand in hand with rural communities around the world. A big focus of the projects is improved water security, for example through rainwater harvesting, drip irrigation, fog catchers, solar-powered boreholes, and greywater recycling. Other projects focus on climate-smart agriculture, alternative livelihoods, education for schools, reforestation, clean cookstoves, and weather stations. The Climate Crowd methodology is to provide training and guidance to local partners who work with communities to collect data using a key informant survey. The Climate Crowd team then analyzes the data, compiling summary reports that highlight key trends. The findings are then presented back to the communities, and we work with them to co-design and implement on-the-ground projects to address climate vulnerabilities using funding from Climate Crowd.

The voice of rural communities is frequently missing from mainstream climate science, even though they are all on the front lines of climate change. This was the motivation to create Climate Crowd, which first got started in 2014, with the idea to crowdsource data on how communities were being impacted by and responding to changes in weather and climate. Often, communities are already coping with these impacts, sometimes in ways that can be harmful to nature. Climate Crowd learns from their experiences, captures their stories, and helps them with practical, nature-compatible ways to deal with their challenges. Often, the solutions are shaped by a community’s own traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

From humble beginnings, with a $30,000 grant from WWF innovation funds, Climate Crowd has grown to include data from over 30 countries and 15 on-the-ground projects in 8 countries to date, with data collection and on-the-ground projects planned across many more sites over the coming year. The Climate Crowd methodology is to provide training and guidance to local partners who work with communities to collect data using a key informant survey. The Climate Crowd team then analyzes the data, compiling summary reports that highlight key trends. The findings are then presented back to the communities, and we work with them to co-design and implement on-the-ground projects to address climate vulnerabilities using funding from Climate Crowd.