ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to address the climate change awareness knowledge dissemination gap that tends to ignore indigenous knowledge systems drawn from local communities. The chapter is based on the epistemological claim that when it comes to issues of climate change, most African societies have rich indigenous knowledge that has not been fully utilized on the subject matter. The chapter also argues that there is a need to understand that there is no absolute knowledge on which the solution to climate change can be based. The concept of knowledge itself is “political.” Written sources have the power of becoming the voice of the powerful while undermining oral sources of knowledge. Therefore, every form of knowledge, be it oral or written, needs to be recognized as a truth that can be used in the response to climate change. This is because although climate change is a new phenomenon, indigenous people have always applied some methods for protecting nature from any form of environmental degradation that would lead to climate change. Speaking from an African feminist perspective, it can be argued that most of the Western ecofeminists scholars who focus on climate change have established and defended their epistemological standpoints on climate change using their own frameworks, whereas African scholarship is still struggling to find its own indigenous methodology and theories for addressing climate change. Hence the need to interrogate these competing forms of knowledge. The chapter uses a multi-sectoral approach to address climate change because issues of climate change are intertwined.
