Identifying and Responding to Drought in the Coffee-Growing Regions of Northwestern Nicaragua

For century, smallholder coffee farmers across northwestern Nicaragua have adapted their agricultural practices to the hydroclimatic regime of the region, which is part of the Mesoamerican dry corridor. The region experiences a bi-modal rainy season with an intervening dry period of weeks to over a month. This phenomenon is often referred to as the mid-summer drought (MSD). Prior work based on hydrometeorological data analysis has shown significant impacts of climate disruption, including a lengthening of the seasonal dry period and an intensification of the drying. In 2014, the region experienced the most severe drought conditions of the past 3 decades, particularly during the months of the first rainy season, critical for the planting cycle. Place-based participatory research with approximately 300 households in the region, as well as focus groups during the 2014 drought summer and subsequently in 2017 reveal community-level concerns about the timing and intensity of the impacts on water use, and the adaptive strategies and capacities of the rural communities during a time of drought. In addition, focus groups with farmers in several communities in northern Nicaragua describe different understandings of the midsummer drought that diverge from commonly accepted metrics used for modeling-based approaches. In this effort we focus on the challenge of of integrating modeling metrics with farmer interpretations of MSD characteristics, focusing on how place-based research with farming communities (instead of earlier studies that rely on strictly meteorological definitions) could inform modeling-based assessments of MSD.