For the Nyangatom of Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, time is not a linear dimension that runs from January to December or more accurately from Lopo to Alongnan; the names the Nyangatom give their months and their year starting with Lopo which is September in the Gregorian calendar. Time happens in cycles; in the rhythm of coming and going, staying and letting things pass, of seasons that bring rains or droughts. In the Lower Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia, time is not counted in numbers. It is lived. In this blog post I reflect on the last research phase where we sat down with Nyangatom community members to learn more about their seasons, their Indigenous Knowledge of time, and how times are changing.

Nyangatom women showing their seasonal calender co-produced with the CoHeMo research team (Photo by: Simon Bunchuay-Peth)

The Nyangatom time turns on two major seasons. Akamu the time of shortage and hunger, when the rains have stopped, the granaries are running out of stocks, and the herders and their cattle left for distant dry-season pastures. Akoporo is in stark contrast to Akamu it is the time of abundance, the time of rain, when sorghum is planted, the animals come home, and ceremonies are celebrated. Between these two poles, the time breathes. It does not progress; it returns.

Within the cycle, each stretch of the year carries a name and each name is a piece of generational wisdom and lived experience rather than a label for a month. Lopo, the month that starts the year in what others call September, means “burnt” or “turning to ash” the world in its driest stage, before any relief arrives. Lomaruk also known as February means “the thundering sky”, the first clouds gathering, the cattle sensing rain and beginning the long walk back toward the pastures around the villages. Lochoto (March), is the “muddy” month: the ground transforms, the rains bring back life in flora, fauna and people alike. Losuban (June), is a sort of climax; the month of ceremonies and celebrations. Livestock is well fed, sorghum harvested, the time when marriages are celebrated and communal life intensifies. Only a few moons later Alongan (August), brings a very different mood. Alongan means solitude: the herders gone again, the settlements quiet, the hardest stretch of the cycle beginning once more.

The Nyangatom descriptions of the months are not merely poetic labels. Each name encodes deeper meanings for life; when to prepare the fields, when to move the herds or when to prepare for hunger. The Nyangatom calendar is a cultural heritage system inscribed by ecological knowledge, built from centuries of close attention to the rains, the grasses, the rivers, and the animals. It’s a knowledge system which enabled the Nyangatom for ages to survive in an ecosystem which many people would declare as “uninhabitable”.

Meeting under the tree with the elders of Chare co-producing a plural climate storyline with the CuHeMo research team during Lomaruk of 2026  (Photo by: Simon Bunchuay-Peth)

In February 2026 during our second research phase we conducted participatory co-research sessions as part of the CuHeMo project learning more on the seasonal cycles, changes over time and how time is understood. The conversations were detailed, sometimes contested. Participants challenged our ‘western’ linear understanding of chronological time. We wanted to talk about the past and to know the years when for example was Lorajemu the well known famine the Nyangatom recount in their oral history. They had to live off their animal skins to survive. They developed a technique to burn the skins in order to be able to eat and digest them. It was far in the past. When exactly? This question (our reconstruction of events hints towards a probable timing during the 1899/1900 El Niño) is far less of importance than the knowledge that it is possible to survive and how. We then asked about the future we were challenged again. You can think about the next season of what will most likely come next but can you think into the future of the next 30 years? Loud protest from the group of elders who are sitting with us under the shade.

– Nyangatom Elder, Feb. 2026

However, this reluctance to look further into the future should not lead us to believe that change and the future play no part in the lives of the Nyangatom. Future and change is already in the Now and it will be and it was in the past. What emerged during our meetings and PLA sessions with the research participants was a strong theme of how the seasons, rhythms and cycles in the Omo Valley are under pressure. Again and again, people described a rainy season that was no longer arriving as expected. “Sometimes those months you cannot expect rain as it used to be” one participant explains. The rains, he said, are shifting “to the later year.” Another explains the consequence for the grass, ekulewu once reliable emergency fodder, the plant that meant animals would survive even a dry year nowadays is vanishing and with it a part of the Nyangatom’s resilience. This knowledge of change is equally important and complementary to all these abstractions of climate projections and post-comma digits we read in the increasing number of climate reports. These observations where Indigenous expertise, past experiences and future imaginations conflate and which are embedded in the community’s own terms, units and ways of knowing is a type of expertise which is still vastly lacking in the debate on climate adaptation and this absence has consequences.

Climate adaptation frameworks are still largely built on linear projections: trajectories that run from a baseline into a modelled future, measured in degrees and decades. The Nyangatom calendar offers something structurally different: a knowledge system designed not to predict an endpoint but to read the present closely enough to act within uncertainty. “The only thing you know about the future is its uncertainty” is not fatalism. It is a sophisticated epistemology; one that has sustained people in one of the world’s most demanding environments across generations of drought, flood, conflict and displacement. When the rains fail and ekulewu disappears from the pastures, that knowledge is already doing climate science. It is just not being cited.

The houses of the Nyangatom can be dismantled in 1 day and rebuilt in 3 days elsewhere, so both spatial and temporal mobility is inscribed in the architecture of the Nyangatom (Photo by: Simon Bunchuay-Peth)

This matters especially for the debate around Loss and Damage. Loss and Damage, as mostly framed in international climate negotiations, tends to focus on what can be quantified: livestock, infrastructure, land; despite the more recent debate on Non-Economic Loss and Damage. But the Nyangatom case points to a different kind of loss, one that is harder to tabulate but no less real. When the ecological anchors that hold a knowledge system together are destroyed, when the Omo river no longer floods because a dam for hydro power and in the name of climate mitigation has regulated it, when the months named after mud and thundering skies begin to mean nothing because those rains no longer come and young generations question the knowledge of their parents and past generation the loss is not only material. It is epistemological. A way of knowing, reading and surviving the world is being eroded, and no compensation framework currently accounts for that. Integrating Indigenous epistemologies into climate adaptation is not about romanticising traditional knowledge or treating it as a museum exhibit. It is about recognising that communities like the Nyangatom hold empirical, tested, and deeply contextual knowledge about environmental change, knowledge that is adaptive by design. The challenge is institutional: to create the conditions in which that knowledge can enter the conversation as expertise, not as anecdote.

This post draws on participatory seasonal calendar sessions, timelines and plural climate storylines conducted in the lower Omo Valley in February 2026 as part of the CuHeMo project’s Ethiopia sub-project. With big thanks to the participants who shared their knowledge and expertise with us and to our co-researchers and interpreters Charles and Soya.