Paper short abstract:

Over the last 20 years, stronger floods and dryer dry seasons have been affecting the inhabitants of the Curuaí floodplain, on the Amazon river, as well as crops, vegetal formations and fish species. Is it only climate change’s fault ? or rather an intertwining of environmental and social changes?

Paper long abstract:

In the Lago Grande de Curuaí, a floodplain of the Amazon river, located close to the city of Santarém (Brazil), the inhabitants have adapted their activities (centered on agriculture, fishing, cattle-raising) to the seasonal fluctuations of the water level. Strong floods used to happen about every 20 years, but recently they have been occuring every 2 or 3 years, reaching water levels previously unrecorded. In recent years, dry seasons have also been drier. People have lost fruit trees and have given up cultivating some annual crops on the lakeside. They also observe a decline in some fish species as well as in forest animals. But climate change, and environmental change in general, are totally intertwined with social, economic and political changes. It is therefore difficult to attribute nature transformations only to climate change. We will present here how these different changes have been interacting with each other, how transformations in animal, plants or ecological formations have been indicators of major environmental changes, but have also been impacted by social and environmental changes. Inhabitants have also led some actions, in particular in order to preserve the fish of the lake. Within the interdisciplinary project in which this research was led, biologists and hydrologists also studied elements of the environment only visible through a microscope. With the help of the social scientists, they established a dialogue with the inhabitants, so that they can cope better with the environmental changes.