Publications

Ground-truthed community-based information over time and space can improve the design of
climate risk instruments, reducing the mismatch between farmers’ reported events and remote
sensing datasets. However, increasing constraints on direct interaction and a lack of incentives
for rural communities’ participation can compromise crowdsourced verification. To address
these issues, we designed a game, KON, that uses “gamified” incentives and behavioral elements
to gather accurate historical climate data by priming memory through the pairwise comparisons
of years and incentivizing accuracy through a points-reward matching system. Our preliminary
results suggest that pairwise comparison can facilitate historical bad years recalling, and there is
a high correspondence between farmers reporting and satellite sources. Moreover, farmers’
reporting clarifies the story when satellite sources disagree. In addition, the number of responses
to the online prototype of the game and the level of participant engagement demonstrated that
our game can be easily adapted to different types of weather events and facilitate the collection
of a large amount of data in a short amount of time. To adapt and generalize the impact of
gamification in diverse agricultural settings, future stages in this project include improve and
expand game versions and interphases (i.e., smartphone, SMS), and perform an RCT evaluation
for additional hypothesis testing.