The “severe” droughts of the past twenty years in the Amazon basin have caused periods with low water levels to last about 30 days longer than usual, leading to “significant impacts” on the population, according to a study published on Friday.
Published in the journal ‘Communications Earth & Environment’, the study was prepared by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and led by Brazilian scientist Leticia Santos de Lima, in collaboration with researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and the Woodwell Climate Research Center (USA).
The data collected indicate that the droughts – especially the severest ones in 2005, 2010 and 2015/2016 – “not only dramatically reduced water levels in a substantial part of the world’s largest river system, but resulted in longer periods of low water levels”which exceeded 100 days, one month longer than usual.
This “substantial increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme phenomena in the Amazon due to climate change” It mainly affects about 50% of non-indigenous communities and 54% of indigenous villages in the Brazilian part of the Amazon basin..
These enclaves depend on rivers and wetlands to move around the area via ships and boats, their most important means of transportation, and are forced “into isolation during severe droughts,” which affects their access to essential goods and services, their movement to urban centres and the maintenance of their livelihoods.
Droughts therefore “condemn them to long periods of scarcity of goods, isolation, restricted access to health and education, limited access to fishing and hunting grounds and other significant impacts” as demonstrated by the information collected “in detail” in these areas through “spatial analysis, hydrological methods and analysis of media content”.
The document also warns about the “insufficient government response” because “it continues to maintain a reactive attitude to the problem instead of planning a long-term adaptation.”
In this regard, he stressed that roads “are not the solution to the isolation of communities” during the dry season, since they act as “a known driver of deforestation that causes changes in rainfall and contributes to a greater volume of sediment in rivers,” which further harms navigability.