Indigenous Ecological Knowledge And Communication For Climate-Risk Adaptation Among The Toto: An Ethnographic Study

Background: Research on climate-risk communication typically treats indigenous knowledge, formal early-warning systems, and everyday media use as separate categories, rarely examining how they operate together within a single person’s daily life. This gap is especially significant for India’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) small, isolated communities rarely studied on either dimension, let alone both together. Objective: This study examines climate-risk perception and response among the Toto of Totopara, West Bengal, using a knowledge–Communication–Adaptation (KCA) Pathway framework that treats indigenous knowledge, communication, and adaptive decision-making as one interacting system. It asks how the Toto perceive and articulate environmental change; how climate and hazard information moves through oral, textual, and digital channels; and how this knowledge and communication translate into household- and community-level adaptation, and its points of connection with formal early-warning systems. Methods: An ethnographic design aligned each KCA stage with a corresponding method: participatory seasonal calendars and photo-elicitation for the knowledge stage; communicative-ecology mapping supported by diary entries written in Bengali for the communication stage; and the Most Significant Change technique for the adaptation stage. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling to capture variation in age, gender, and connectivity. In-depth interviews formed the core instrument across all three phases; data were analysed thematically and mapped onto the KCA stages, with attention to linkage and disjuncture between indigenous and formal systems. Results: Risk perception among the Toto emerged from the interaction of inherited ecological knowledge shifting heat, rainfall, and seasonal boundaries, and indicators drawn from ants, birds, frogs, and prolonged fog with a layered, unevenly trusted mix of oral, mobile, and broadcast communication. A small, informally constituted set of “hub” individuals teachers, health workers, youth volunteers, and elders who translate outside information into locally trusted, Toto-language terms provided the clearest evidence of the knowledge-to-communication link the KCA framework anticipates. A Most Significant Change narrative showed that direct experience of a hazard event, more than the warning that preceded it, drove durable household adaptation, including routine forecast-checking, structural reinforcement, and emergency stockpiling. The clearest points of disjuncture were the district-scale resolution mismatch between mobile and broadcast forecasts and hyperlocal terrain, the continued absence of any Toto-script or clan-structure channel for hazard information, and the unsystematised nature of the community’s own intermediary “hub” role. Conclusion: This study contributes new ethnographic evidence from a little-studied PVTG, using the KCA framework to treat indigenous knowledge, communication, and adaptive decision-making as a single system rather than separate topics. It identifies concrete, culturally grounded points language, trusted intermediaries, and hazard-specific alerting at which formal early-warning systems could integrate more closely with existing local practice, contributing toward more inclusive climate-risk policy.