The rivers of the Amazon Basin serve as highways for much of the region. Boats are often the easiest and quickest way to get goods and services in and out of remote communities and large cities alike. However, the Amazon Basin has experienced several severe droughts over the last 20 years, which have caused river levels to drop so low they couldn’t be used to navigate through the region.
In the Brazilian Amazon, this puts Indigenous and local communities at risk of isolation, restricting their access to essential services, a recently published study has found.
To arrive at these findings, researchers looked at 3,671 non-Indigenous Brazilian localities, from large cities and state capitals to small towns, as well as 2,521 Indigenous villages.
They assessed each community’s risk of isolation by comparing their distance from the closest navigable water body and road. They found that roughly 60% of non-Indigenous communities are closer to a water body than a road, while 66% of the Indigenous communities were more reliant on waterways in the high-water season. This reliance on rivers means that a significant portion of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities face the risk of becoming isolated during extreme droughts.
The researchers also analyzed 142 digital news statements reporting on the impact of droughts between 2000 and 2020 and found that transportation, food supply and water supply were the most frequently cited concerns.
During severe droughts, such as those that occurred in 2005, 2010, 2015-16, and 2023, river navigation becomes challenging or even impossible, the authors wrote, rendering people unable to access basic medical care, education services and food. Furthermore, locals can no longer trade the foods they produce, including nuts, cassava, fruits and fish, leading to poverty. Extreme drought can also create food insecurity as rivers dry up and fish become inaccessible.
Moreover, drought conditions are linked to a rise in waterborne diseases and respiratory illnesses due to deteriorating water quality and increased wildfires. Reduced river levels can also hinder environmental law enforcement in remote areas, the authors write. Additionally, wildlife including turtles and manatees become more vulnerable to poaching as their habitats shrink.
Climate projections suggest the Amazon will be drier and experience more droughts in the future. “This might be the ‘new normal’ for the Amazon,” Letícia Santos de Lima, lead author of the study and an environmental hydrogeology researcher with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, wrote in Springer Nature.
Lima added that her team is concerned that pro-road officials might see their research as an affirmation that constructing more roads is the solution to helping isolated communities. In fact, roads frequently lead to more deforestation and changes in rainfall that exacerbate drought conditions, she wrote. Instead, the researchers advocated for including local knowledge in “identifying potential solutions and opportunities for adaptation,” they wrote in the study.
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