Leveraging communities’ network strengths to support climate change adaptation information-sharing: a study with coffee farmers in Risaralda, Colombia

The success of climate change adaptation measures is influenced by social factors that are context specific. An important social factor influencing outcomes is communication or the way information spreads through groups of people who need adaptation support. A community’s unique information-sharing potential can be understood through social network analysis. A social network perspective views humans as actors in a system of interconnected relationships. This approach is useful for mapping information flows or how adaptation strategies can spread within a community. Through a study with coffee farmers in Risaralda, Colombia, we demonstrate how a community’s network strengths can be identified in order to develop tailored climate change adaptation communication strategies. To do this, we measure ego networks, which are social relations stemming from one “unit of interest,” or coffee farmers, around climate change. From there, we identify the information attributes or the preferred ways farmers receive and send information on climate change. Lastly, we analyze this data against the broader stakeholder system to provide a macro level context. Together, this provides a clear vision of how climate change adaptation strategies may be spread through a community’s information network. For coffee farmers in Risaralda, Colombia, key institutions and their agents do not currently acknowledge long-term climate change. The farmers interact the most on this subject with their self-organizing associations. Therefore, targeting information campaigns to local associations offers the most potential for effective climate change adaptation information-sharing, and these same associations also offer the in-person communication these farmers indicate they prefer.