Fruitful exchanges: social networks and food resources amidst change.

BACKGROUND: The Amazon region of Brazil is known both for its significant biological and cultural diversity. It is also a region, like many parts of the country, marked by food insecurity, even amongst its rural agricultural populations. In a novel approach, this paper addresses the networks of exchanges of local food and their relationship to the agrobiodiversity of traditional riverine peoples' (ribeirinho) households in the Central Amazon. Methodologically, it involves mapping the social networks and affinities between households, inventories of known species, and, finally, statistical tests of the relationships between network and subsequent agrobiodiversity. RESULTS: The diversity per area of each land type where food cultivation or management takes place shows how home gardens, fields and orchards are areas of higher diversity and intense cultivation compared to fallow areas. Our findings, however, indicate that a household's income does appear to be strongly associated with the total agrobiodiversity across cultivation areas. In addition, a household's agrobiodiversity is significantly associated with the frequency and intensity of food exchanges between households. CONCLUSIONS: Agrobiodiversity cannot be considered separate from the breadth of activities focused on sustenance and yields from the cash economy, which riverine people engage in daily. It seems to be connected to quotidian social interactions and exchanges in both predictable and occasionally subtler ways. Those brokers who serve as prominent actors in rural communities may not always be the most productive or in possession of the largest landholdings, although in some cases they are. Their proclivity for cultivating and harvesting a wide diversity of produce may be equally important if not more so. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40066-021-00342-5.

Social and health dimensions of climate change in the Amazon.

CONTEXT: The Amazon region has been part of climate change debates for decades, yet attention to its social and health dimensions has been limited. OBJECTIVE: This paper assesses literature on the social and health dimensions of climate change in the Amazon. A conceptual framework underscores multiple stresses and exposures created by interactions between climate change and local social-environmental conditions. METHODS: Using the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science, this study bibliometrically assessed the overall literature on climate change in the Amazon, including Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Environmental Science/Ecology and Public, Environmental/Occupational Health. From this assessment, a relevant sub-sample was selected and complemented with literature from the Brazilian database SciELO. RESULTS: This sample discusses three dimensions of climate change impacts in the region: livelihood changes, vector-borne diseases and microbial proliferation, and respiratory diseases. This analysis elucidates imbalance and disconnect between ecological, physical and social and health dimensions of climate change and between continental and regional climate analysis, and sub-regional and local levels. CONCLUSION: Work on the social and health implications of climate change in the Amazon falls significantly behind other research areas, limiting reliable information for analytical models and for Amazonian policy-makers and society at large. Collaborative research is called for.