Exploring community adaptation to changes the Amazon River dynamics through a transdisciplinary approach and knowledge co-production

The ongoing intensification of extreme climate events poses an increasing threat to the Amazon River and its floodplains, significantly impacting the riverine Indigenous communities whose livelihoods, mobility, and health are closely linked to the dynamics of the freshwater environment. These increasing hydroclimatic changes highlight the need for a thorough understanding of freshwater systems within a social-ecological nexus in order to develop co-designed strategies and support locally grounded resilience planning.
The study presents an initial insight into the research activities of the NAÃNE project (New Strategies for Environmental Adaptation for Communities and Ecosystems, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation), which objective is to support community resilience to climatic change by conducting socio-morphodynamic investigations in the Colombian Amazon River corridor, which shall support the development of adaptation strategies including early warning systems.
The study is based on three months of field-campaign conducted among communities living along the Amazon River between the municipalities of Puerto Nariño and Leticia in the Colombian Amazon. By integrating hydrological and morphological perspectives with local knowledge, this project attempts to develop a transdisciplinary methodology of the case study area's freshwater systems resilience. The field methodology is based on preliminary context analysis, which reveals droughts and river contraction as the main challenge faced by the communities. Thus, field data collection comprised qualitative, semi-structured interviews combined with spatially explicit participatory mapping techniques. Field data collected were then compared and integrated with the available hydrological data (water levels) and remote sensing analysis of medium-resolution satellite images to evaluate the local morphodynamics. A total of seventeen interviews were conducted with representative members of four indigenous communities in the study area: Macedonia and Mocagua, located along the main channel, and San Martín de Amacayacu and San Francisco,  located on the tributaries. The combination of interviews and participatory mapping enabled the collection of community perceptions of changes in hydrological seasonality across space and time, from both a graphical and a qualitative perspective. The resulting maps identified historically and currently perceived seasonal water level changes, seasonal navigation points, and cultivated areas, integrated with available hydrological and morphodynamic evaluation. The findings highlighted the impacts of past drought events on community livelihoods, including fishing, agriculture, and local trade, as well as on navigation, access to drinking water, and human health. 
Overall, this study emphasises the importance of a transdisciplinary and inclusive methodology to have a thorough understanding of the local riverine communities and develop effective strategies for riverine systems resilience, setting the basis for knowledge co-production within the NAÃNE project, where local communities, policy makers and water resources managers collaborate to inform decision-making processes.