Paper short abstract:

A survey on the accuracy of proverbs containing information on Sierra Neveda's climatic, physical and biological systems suggests that urban areas' residents have less knowledge of climatic proverbs that rural areas' residents and that elders consider that climatic proverbs are not accurate anymore.

Paper long abstract:

In places where global climate models are too coarse to detect the impacts of climate change, Indigenous and Local Knowledge could be an alternative data source that could contribute to our understanding of the local impacts of climate change. We explore whether proverbs, defined as concise and short sentences containing locally accepted truths and teachings, can help in the study of local climate change impacts. We collected local proverbs in five municipalities of the Alta Alpujarra Occidental, Sierra Nevada (Spain) and classified them according to whether they referred to the climatic, physical, or biological systems. We randomly selected 30 proverbs and interviewed local residents (n=97) to assess their 1) knowledge and 2) perception of current accuracy of proverbs. Results show that people in the more urbanized municipalities had a low knowledge of climatic proverbs. Overall, informants -and particularly older informants- considered that many proverbs were not accurate anymore. Climatic proverbs were considered less accurate than proverbs referring to the biological and physical systems. The methodology used in this work could be reproduced in data-deficient areas to understand the local impacts of climate change.