Factors affecting perceptions of climate variability and change

Misperceptions of climate variability are not simply the product of people misunderstanding the weather. They are constructed through the interaction of memory, language, livelihoods, information systems and wider political and economic pressures. Moreover, perceptions of climate variability and change. Climate is not perceived through rainfall and temperature alone. It is also perceived through the words, categories and narratives people use to make sense of change. One of the most persistent drivers of misperception is the blurring of concepts such as weather, climate and climatic variability. In everyday life, these tend to merge into each other. A delayed onset of rain, an unusually hot week, or an erratic rainy season can all be read not as short-term variability, but as evidence that the climate itself has fundamentally shifted. Where rainfall is already highly variable, this confusion becomes more likely, not less. This is particularly true for Southern Africa.

Additionally, the social construction of what is considered a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ year. These are not meteorological categories. They are livelihood categories. A good year is not just a year with reasonable rainfall. It is a year in which rainfall is sufficient for households to meet their production needs. As those needs intensify due to population growth, shrinking landholdings, soil degradation, or economic hardship, the amount of rainfall considered adequate also increases. The same amount of rain may increasingly be described as insufficient. What appears to be a perception of declining rainfall may therefore reflect changing livelihood pressures as much as any evidence-based climatic trend. 

The same pattern applies to drought. In scientific terms, drought is usually defined through a rainfall deficit relative to a long-term average. In lived experience, however, drought is more often defined through impact. Hunger, crop failure, livestock stress and broader hardship become the evidence from which drought is inferred. Once drought becomes a shorthand for hardship, diverse social, economic, and environmental pressures are subsumed within climate narratives. In the process, causality gets compressed, and complex livelihood crises come to be attributed largely to declining climatic conditions.

This is where attribution mismatch becomes important. Falling yields, reduced grazing, water shortages, livestock disease, firewood scarcity and worsening rural hardship may all be experienced as proof that the climate is deteriorating. Yet many of these outcomes are also shaped by economic instability, changing demographics, reduced access to agricultural inputs, environmental degradation and shifts in land availability. When these impacts are routinely narrated in climatic terms, climate becomes the dominant explanation even when the underlying causes are multiple and deeply interconnected. These misperceptions matter because they can drive risk aversion. When people come to believe that seasons are becoming uniformly worse, or that farming has become fundamentally unreliable, they may withdraw from productive but perceived high-risk activities. Households may reduce investment in inputs, delay planting decisions, avoid experimenting with new varieties, or default to low-return coping strategies that feel safer under conditions of uncertainty. In this way, misperception does more than shape understanding; it can narrow the range of perceived responses, discourage experimentation, and ultimately reinforce vulnerability.

Language plays a particularly important role in this. Words such as “drought”, “climate change”, “bad season”, “failed rains” and “unpredictable weather” are not neutral descriptors. They carry meaning shaped by experience, culture and social exchange. They simplify complex realities into familiar explanations. They can also heighten fear. When uncertainty is repeatedly described through crisis language, it can produce a more pessimistic reading of the future and encourage defensive decision-making. Language does not merely describe environmental change; it frames it, determining which experiences are grouped together, which causal explanations are emphasised and which responses appear rational.

Formal information systems compound this. Radio, television, schools and extension services help introduce and normalise concepts such as climate change. Once these concepts enter public discourse, they shape expectation. People become more likely to notice, remember and prioritise experiences that appear to confirm the broader narrative of climatic decline. This does not mean that narrative is wrong. It means that climate change can become an interpretive lens through which many different forms of hardship are understood. Where that lens becomes overly deterministic, it can deepen risk aversion by making future livelihoods appear more precarious than they may actually be. Misperceptions are further reinforced by inherited narratives about the past. Claims that rainfall was better, seasons were more reliable and production was higher are often repeated across generations. These become a form of borrowed climatic memory, blending observations about weather with wider reflections on labour availability, input access, population density and soil fertility. Over time, such stories transform into common sense. The past becomes idealised, the present is more readily explained as deterioration, and the future can begin to feel too risky to invest in with any confidence.

The wider point is straightforward. Misperceptions of climate variability are built not only from direct experience, but from interpretation. And, interpretation is shaped by language. The categories people use to define drought, judge rainfall, describe hardship and explain change can amplify some signals, mute others and blur the boundary between climate stress and wider livelihood stress. They can also shape behaviour by encouraging risk aversion in contexts where confidence, experimentation and timely investment are precisely what adaptation requires. Any serious climate adaptation effort must therefore pay attention not only to climate data, but also to the words and narratives through which people make sense of environmental change.

Which narratives are shaping decisions in your community right now?

Link to Doctoral Thesis: Investigating the Factors that Lead to the Construction of Gendered Perceptions of Climate Variability and Change