Avaliação da capacidade adaptativa de comunidades camponesas do semiárido brasileiro às mudanças climáticas e à pandemia da COVID-19

Abstract

Global climate change is causing changes in many physical and biological systems at various scales and is also reflected in local livelihoods. In semiarid regions, the effects of climate change are associated with considerable increases in the levels of aridity, frequency and intensity of droughts. This scenario represents a great challenge for human populations that depend on the natural environment to carry out agricultural and livestock activities. Recently, the shock posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the rapid environmental changes that are taking place at local and global scales, may increase the vulnerability of local livelihoods and, consequently, reduce their resilience. Thus, the aim of this study is to understand the resilience of the livelihoods of semi-arid peasant communities in the face of impacts caused by global climate change and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. We seek to understand how adaptive capacity varies as a function of livelihood resilience as well as the agricultural model employed and the adaptive strategies adopted to deal with shocks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with peasant families residing in three rural settlements in Rio Grande do Norte in which we quantified the livelihood resilience, the family income, and the degree of agroecological transition. We use structured equation models and generalized linear models to test our hypotheses. Overall, both the resilience of livelihoods and the degree of agroecological transition were low. Our results showed a positive effect of livelihood resilience on adaptive capacity in the climate change scenario. The agroecological transition and adaptive strategies did not have a significant effect on adaptive capacity related to climate change. For the COVID – 19 scenario, none of the studied predictors had a significant effect on adaptive capacity. We also found a positive effect of the fruit growing activity and the size of the cultivated area on the adaptive capacity in the climate change scenario, however the same was not true for the COVID – 19 scenario. Our results may serve as a basis for actions aimed at increasing the resilience of socio-ecological systems in semiarid regions, as well as for the establishment of metrics for monitoring and evaluating interventions related to the stressors studied.