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The research project ‘Adaptations to climate change amongst natural resource-dependant societies in the developing world: across the southern African climate gradient’examines the characteristics of people’s responses to recent historical climate variability and change in four locations in southern Africa. There has been little systematic research into adaptation in the developing world: this research both increases the data base on such adaptations and uses these data to explore key traits of coping and adaptation, in order to examine particularly the processes that contribute to the shaping and dynamics of human responses to climate change in a region where use of the natural environment is a key component of livelihoods.

Study areas were selected on the basis of exposure to drought and heavy rainfall, and then within South Africa by using the technique of Self Organising Mapping analysis to differentiate detailed trends of climate change since 1950. This allowed changes in climate to be discriminated in terms not simply of general wetting and drying trends, but of detailed changes in the timing, duration and magnitude of rainfall occurrence.