Abstract
Small-scale farmers who depend on natural resources for subsistence in rural areas are especially vulnerable to climate change and may develop adaptive responses once they understand the nature of the risks and their consequences. We examine the effects of schooling, experience in agriculture, and the number and severity of risks perceived by farmers on the number and type of adaptive responses developed. Ninety-four farmers were surveyed in six rural communities in Catimbau National Park, Pernambuco, Brazil, to obtain socioeconomic data about major drought events and perceived related risks. Participants were asked to classify risks according to their severity. We argue that understanding the degree of vulnerability of social-ecological systems in semi-arid regions may facilitate actions at different scales to mitigate risks arising from climate change.
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Notes
In this research, we consider vulnerability to be the degree to which a system cannot recover from the damaging effects of climate change, including variability and extremes (IPCC 2001): the lower the capacity of a system to adapt to the adverse effects of a new environmental reality, the greater its degree of vulnerability (Smit and Wandel 2006).
We note that people residing in the same residence could have different understandings of a phenomenon, and so we did not interview them on the same day.
To establish the average severity attributed to the risk, we used the same classification used by the informants, i.e., 1 = most severe, etc..
We assumed that farmers mentioned adaptive strategies that were at least reasonably effective in dealing with perceived risks. To test the effectiveness of these adaptive mechanisms, we would need quantitative data from a specific hypothesis, which was not the subject of this study. Thus, our explanation here is predominantly qualitative.
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Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to all residents of the rural communities of PARNA Catimbau who contributed to this study. We also express our gratitude to colleagues from the Laboratory of Ecology and Evolution of Social-Ecological Systems (LEA) who contributed to data collection and the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE) for granting transportation to the study area, and Dr. Leonardo da Silva Chaves for his support in the statistical analysis of the study.
Funding
This study was partially financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. The study received a contribution of the INCT Ethnobiology, Bioprospecting, and Nature Conservation, certified by CNPq, with financial support from the Foundation for Support to Science and Technology of the State of Pernambuco (Grant number: APQ-0562–2.01/17). We also thank the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq (PQ- 305285/2020–3, 402864/2016–6).
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Magalhães, H.F., Feitosa, I.S., de Lima Araújo, E. et al. Perceptions of Risks Related to Climate Change in Agroecosystems in a Semi-arid Region of Brazil. Hum Ecol 49, 403–413 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00247-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00247-8