Drought effects on inland water transport and impacts on local communities of the Amazon Basin

Keywords: Hydrological drought; inland water transport; sensitivity; local communities; climate extremes; climate change

The Amazon River Basin has long been under threat due to climate change. Hydroclimatic records show an increase in both the duration and intensity of recent droughts (e.g., 2005 and 2010) and projections indicate a higher frequency of weather extremes such as droughts and floods in the future. Droughts change river conditions, hence impacting navigation via small and mid-size vessels. Impacts include the total or partial isolation of entire rural communities for weeks or months. With this work we aim to partially answer the following research questions: how have hydrological droughts affected inland water transport in the Amazon basin in recent decades? What were the impacts on local communities associated with constrained accessibility in the region? For that, we used a collection of articles for the period of 2000-2020 from digital media outlets, that is: magazines, newspapers, and other news sources that regularly public their content on the web. The digital media data collection was performed using Google Search engine. To collect the results, we employed the software platform Apify. We set the scraper to return search results for the queries “Amazon”, “drought”, “navigability”; and “Amazon”, “drought”, “isolated” (in Portuguese). News collected from digital media outlets were listed in a spreadsheet and manually processed. We adopted a sequency of exclusion criteria to filter results and produced a table of results with each statement, that is, a text extract from the media items. One digital media news piece can have more than one statement, and whenever that was the case, they were treated separately. We adopted a categorization scheme based on the economic activities/sectors affected by the droughts.

After applying exclusion criteria, the digital media database returned 145 unique entries of statements reporting effects of droughts and/or direct impact on communities from a total of 71 digital media items. Among the 145 unique entries, 119 statements reported impacts of droughts on the lives of local communities. The years of 2005, 2009-2010, 2015-2016 were the most expressive in terms of the number of media pieces reporting effects of droughts according to our analysis. However, localized drier conditions were also registered via media outlets in other years such as 2013, 2018, 2019 and 2020. October was the month with the highest number of news pieces reporting droughts (n = 19), followed by September (n = 15), and August (n = 11). Inland water transport became deeply affected, as reflected by the 97 statements (66.9%). In total, there were 31 statements (21.4%) mentioning impacts on the food supply chain, including wholesale food trade, food retail, grain trade. Logistic issues due to low water levels increased food prices. Impacts on fuel supply were mentioned in 21 statements (14.5%), including impacts on wholesale trade and automotive fuel retail market. Electric power generation and/or distribution were mentioned 6 times in the statements. Due to isolation of communities, many services became affected, such as medical care, access to schools, leisure activities, post service, immunization and pest control.