Dr. David G. McGrath of the Woods Hole Research Center studies community-based management of fisheries and forests in Amazonian Brazil. Climate change is increasing extreme events like floods and droughts that alter rainfall timing and destroy crops, as seen in towns like Igarape.
Hi, I'm Toby McGrath. I'm a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. I work primarily in Amazonian Brazil. My focus is on community based management of natural resources, fisheries and also forest resources.
Climate change is often associated with more higher frequency of extreme events. Extreme floods, extreme droughts, extreme low water reflecting drought elsewhere in the basin and and also changes in the timing and amount of rainfall that people have. Interaction between these changes can mean the difference between losing a crop to drought or losing a crop to flood. Sometimes two crops, one to flood and one to drought in the same year.
The picture you see is of a house in the town of Igarape del.
Costa, one of the lowest sited communities in the lower Amazon. That is to say, it gets flooded first and it's the last to be essentially exposed after floodwaters reside. So it's highly vulnerable to extreme floods and extreme droughts. In the 2009 flood, which is one of the highest on record, the community suffered great damage. It's located in the middle of an island surrounded by three huge lakes. And many of the houses of the community are completely vulnerable to the lakes because there isn't anything between the house and the wider lake behind it. In response to the flood, many community residents began to recognize that these floating mats of grasses that grow over the lakes during the high water season, plus trees and forests, were a very important protection against the impacts of waves and the flood waters in general. And many people in the community and the community itself then began to effort that. We have helped advise, provided technical assistance and organizational capacity building assistance to do a large project to plant buffers of floating grasses behind the community on both sides that would then protect the.
