There is a growing recognition of the value of incorporating traditional indigenous knowledge in climate change adaptation planning. A well framed participatory framework is widely seen as important in mainstreaming climate change adaptation within community-based initiatives. This paper draws on experience from SPARC[1], a UNDP community-based climate adaptation pilot project in Eastern Indonesia. Results and evidence from the field demonstrate a range of enablers as well as barriers to the integration of indigenous and contemporary knowledge into climate adaptation programs. This paper coalesces average annual rainfall data from the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology alongside the perspective of local ‘climate farmers groups’. These community perspectives were derived from focus discussion groups. Each of these villages’ groups had subscribed to the SPARC climate adaptation pilot project. It is found that many of the farmers’ climate groups within the communities in the sample possess the ability to monitor natural indicators using traditional knowledge. In some cases, this traditional knowledge serves as an enabler to the process of building climate resilience and in some cases it serves as a barrier to interventions. The case studies provide evidence of how communities use their traditional knowledge to predict or anticipate alterations in annual weather cycles thus reinforcing adaptive capacity. This paper also sheds light on barriers to climate change adaptation resulting from a high dependency on traditional knowledge within the context of increasingly extreme climate variability and changing rainfall patterns.