“A little bit obsessed with the weather”: Leveraging Australian farmers’ online weather practices to inform the design of climate services

ABSTRACT

Farmers’ local knowledge represents an important yet underutilised resource in climate adaptation. The emergence of online region-specific climate projections presents an opportunity to leverage farmers expertise in reading and responding to short-term weather forecasts as a design input into longer-term climate services. This paper leverages insights gained through a detailed exploration of existing everyday weather application (app) practices from 25 Australian farmers across different commodities. Through the lens of Social Practice Theory, the paper details how farmers chose, accessed and utilised online weather information in decision-making. Farmers accessed between one and six weather apps daily, with perceived accuracy the largest determinant of adoption. The paper provides detailed knowledge of farmers’ practices accessing online weather information and based on these practices, recommends four considerations for the design of multi-decadal online climate services including: (1) Leveraging tacit knowledge and existing practices of tinkering and appropriation. (2) Supporting the triangulation and comparison practices common to use of weather apps. (3) Setting expectations regarding the perceived accuracy of climate projections. (4) Ensuring climate information is available and salient when climate-relevant decisions are made. Through these considerations, the paper aims to benefit end-users of climate services by ensuring climate information responds to user needs and fits within existing practices.

KEYWORD:

• Weather
• climate services
• social practice theory
• farmers
• usability

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all participants for their generosity of time and FarmLink for their assistance in sampling for the research. The research has benefited from guidance and support from the CSIRO Drought Resilience Mission. Use of named products does not imply support or promotion and we acknowledge the weather and climate apps mentioned represent only a fraction of the possible apps available online.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/27685241.2023.2296652

Notes

¹ For example: Climate Services for Agriculture (Australia): https://climateservicesforag.indraweb.io/. Victoria’s Climate Future Tool (Australia): https://vicfutureclimatetool.indraweb.io/project. Med-Gold (Europe): https://www.med-gold.eu/. Cal-Adapt (US): https://cal-adapt.org/. National Trust Climate Hazards Map (UK): https://national-trust.maps.arcgis.com/.

² Climate Services for Agriculture: https://climateservicesforag.indraweb.io/.

³ www.myclimateview.com.au.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’ Future Drought Fund and by CSIRO. There is no grant number.