Impacts of climate change on family farming in the North and Northeast of Brazil

Abstract

Climate change represents one of the greatest challenges that rulers, policymakers, and civil society in general face in the 21st century. According to the sixth evaluation report - AR6 - by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR6, 2021, p. v), the recent changes in the climate system, particularly the heating of the atmosphere, were caused unequivocally by “human activities”, and are “unprecedented over centuries to thousands of years”. The conclusions of the IPCC-AR6 (2021, p. v; 8) indicate that “each of the last four decades [1980 to 2020] has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850” and that extreme climate events, such as heatwaves, storms droughts, and tropical cyclones “have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s”. All regions of the planet have been (and will continue to be) affected by climate change. However, the risks and impacts differ significantly in terms of place and sector. Semiarid regions and those located in middle and low latitudes tend to be more exposed to the effects of climate change, such as heat extremes and periods with abnormal soil moisture deficit (combination of very low or scarce rainfall and excess evapotranspiration). This last impact, called “agricultural and ecological drought”, will become more common in various global regions, including South America, affecting food production and ecosystem functions in general (IPCC-AR6, 2021). In Brazil, the North and Northeast regions are expected to be even more exposed to the effects of climate change. The agricultural sector is one of those that undergo the greatest negative impacts resulting from climate change. The main conclusion from research is that elements such as droughts, higher rainfall variability, increased average temperatures, heat extremes, as well as the high atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, have already been causing harvest losses and reduced agricultural productivity, which tend to intensify in future climate change scenarios (Jägermeyr et al., 2021; Müller et al., 2021). Such losses make it difficult to overcome other major global challenges, especially poverty and income inequality, food insecurity, and hunger. Thus, it can be said that there is a nexus between these themes, as shown in Figure 1 (Charles, Kalikoski and Macnaughton, 2019; Schnitter and Berry, 2019). Agricultural losses reduce the economic activity of regions that rely the most on the primary sector, increasing unemployment rates; with lower food production, their prices and those of other products in the production chain rise, which impairs the consumption, the nutritional quality of the diet, and the health of the population. As stated by Mbow et al. (2019, p. 439), throughout the 21st century, there can be up to.