Communities on Brazil's 'River of Unity' tested by dams, climate change

[Judi Lynn]

by Sarah Sax on 2 June 2020

The Pixaim Quilombo is one of many traditional communities made up mostly of Afro-Brazilian descendants of runaway slaves. It sits at the mouth of the São Francisco River, one of Brazil’s most important waterways.

Once a thriving community, it has been struggling for decades due to the impacts of upriver dams which reduce the river’s flow and alter aquatic migrations. As a result, one of the community’s two chief livelihoods has been sharply curtailed — the river’s fishery is in steep decline.

Now, climate change threatens to make those struggles even greater, further changing fish populations, reducing river flow even more, and dangerously elevating the salinity of the stream as seawater intrudes. Rice, which once provided Paixim’s second major livelihood, can no longer be grown in the delta’s saltier marshes.

Pixaim is seeing a major outmigration as subsistence livelihoods becomes more difficult. Residents there count among 18 million people residing in the São Francisco River watershed, impacted by a steadily dwindling water resource.

The Piaçabuçu dunes, a unique geological formation, are classified as a protected area. Image by Sarah Sax.

PIAÇABUÇU, Alagoas state Brazil — The landscape where the São Francisco River enters the Atlantic Ocean seems so out of place it makes one wonder if this is still coastal Brazil. White sand dunes stretch as far as the eye can see; clusters of cashew trees throw flickering shadows like ocean waves on the sand.

Here among these shifting dunes escaped slaves in the 19th century hid from, and out-maneuvered, the Portuguese who came searching for them. Eventually, the formerly enslaved founded the Pixaim Quilombo near the mouth of the river and developed a reliable sustainable lifestyle and community well attuned to the dynamic, always changing estuary.

More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/06/communities-on-brazils-river-of-unity-tested-by-dams-climate-change/

Also posted in Environment and energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127138243