Publicações

Although hydropower companies and governments have promoted monetary-based Benefit-Sharing Mechanisms alone as a vector of local development for flooded municipalities, it is not possible to identify this evidence in the scientific literature. The present work investigates the quantitative influence of Financial Compensation on Human Development Indexes (HDI) in flooded municipalities over 20002010. The econometric analysis shows that there are no statistically significant results related to the quantities of Financial Compensation and the development variables. The findings reinforce that Financial Compensation itself could not be considered the only input to improve development processes. Management frameworks should be considered since they can provide a broader view of the affected areas, including elements such as participatory processes, adaptation management, formal and legal guidelines and stakeholder engagement. Specially in the Brazilian case, the Impact Assessment procedures and their products could provide detailed data and criteria to municipalities to manage the inflow resources.

This study presents novel results about ocean-atmosphere CO2exchanges based upon novel directin situmea-surements of turbulentfluxes using the eddy covariance (EC) methodology. This study was carried out on theSoutheast coast of Brazil and the adjacent open ocean during two days of the austral winter of 2015, on board theRV Vital de Oliveira. This is thefirst time that the EC technique was used in this region for CO2flux studies. Theresults presented illustrate contrasting magnitudes of CO2fluxes measured on the open sea region(1.22 ± 2.08μmol m−2s−1), the Brazil Current (−2.92 ± 1.25μmol m−2s−1) and the coastal region(−3.11 ± 1.67μmol m−2s−1). The main cause of negative CO2fluxes, indicating a mean CO2sink behavior ofthis region, is due to the occurrence of the coastal upwelling phenomenon and the atmospheric conditions. Wefound that lower atmosphere local modulation due to sea surface temperature (SST) variations along the studyregion combined with the large-scale atmospheric synoptic conditions contributed to theflux behavior.

Land-use change results from the decisions of diverse actors in response to economic and political contexts. Identification of underlying decision-making processes is key to understanding land-use patterns, anticipating trends, and designing effective environmental governance mechanisms. Here, we use a scenario-based decision game to examine hypothetical land-use decisions among four groups of rural producers in the municipalities of Sinop, Guarantã do Norte and Novo Progresso in the Brazilian Amazon. We simulate changes in agricultural prices, production cost, and frequency of environmental monitoring (in situ inspections) to understand how land-use decisions are made and change with shifts in economic and governance incentives. Hypothetical land-use decisions vary across scenarios, but not across study sites; environmental law enforcement influence land decisions, but not to the extent of dominating market factors and not for all types of producers. Decision games cannot substitute approaches to explain behavioral responses from observational data. However, they can provide immediate feedback on behavioral hypotheses before comprehensive observational data becomes available and support the development of models for land-use policy planning at local and regional scales.

The proper disposal of municipal solid waste (MSW) is a global challenge, mainly in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to review recent improvements and remaining challenges of municipal solid waste disposal (MSWD) in Brazil focusing on the environmental impacts caused by inappropriate disposal of MSW. Before the implementation of the Brazilian Solid Waste Policy (BSWP), in 2008, 72.3% of all municipalities in Brazil disposed of their MSW in open dumps and uncontrolled landfills. In 2015, after the deadline given by the BSWP to close all open dumps and uncontrolled landfills had expired, 60% of all Brazilian municipalities still dispose their MSW improperly. Therefore, while progress occurred in the management practices for MSWD in Brazil, the improvements have not occurred as fast as expected by the BSWP and several shortcomings remain, which cause significant environmental impacts.

No Brasil, a seca é um fenômeno caracterizado pela sua ampla cobertura espacial e recorrência na região semiárida, principalmente devido à sua vulnerabilidade hídrica. Quase 28 milhões de pessoas vivem na região, que concentra a maior parte da população mais pobre do Brasil. Assim, a seca é uma ameaça natural na medida em que ocorre de forma intensiva e extensiva em áreas densamente povoadas, podendo resultar em desastre quando as capacidades locais são insuficientes para evitar danos significativos. O risco de um desastre associado à seca está relacionado com a ameaça física, as vulnerabilidades locais, a capacidade de resposta e com as políticas de mitigação. O presente estudo apresenta os desafios para a consolidação de um sistema de alerta de risco de desastres associados às secas no Brasil e propõe uma estrutura inicial de atribuição de responsabilidades entre as instituições nacionais envolvidas com a temática com a finalidade de guiar ações para a mitigação dos riscos.

Galápagos é um arquipélago considerado como um laboratório para o estudo da evolução, o primeiro Parque Nacional do Equador, e é Patrimônio Natural da Humanidade. Entretanto, com a chegada de cerca de 218 mil turistas ao ano, há pressão sobre os frágeis ecossistemas deste arquipélago insular. Esta pesquisa objetivou analisar o Sistema Sócioecológico (SSE) da Ilha São Cristovão a partir das percepções dos habitantes sobre ameaças, mudanças e impactos ocorridos a partir da publicação da Lei Especial de Galápagos em 10 de março de 1998 até 2017. As informações obtidas basearam-se em entrevistas semiestruturadas com 260 moradores, selecionados por amostragem probabilística do tipo aleatória simples. Ademais, aplicaram-se as técnicas exploratórias de análise fatorial de correspondência múltipla AFCM” para 30 variáveis cuja descrição perpassa os problemas discutidos nas sessões da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (UNESCO). A Ilha São Cristovão apresenta homens (53,46%) e mulheres (46,54%) residindo principalmente em Porto Baquerizo (71,92%); a maioria (60%) proveniente de outras ilhas povoadas (Santa Cruz, Florena e Isabela) e também do Equador continental. As correlações da análise estatística evidenciaram uma tendência a respostas positivas, contudo sinalizaram alguns impactos no modo de vida, especialmente relacionado ao aumento do turismo, às espécies introduzidas e à redução da mina, devido à extração de areia, cascalho e pedra para fazer as construções. Diante desse cenário, os atores locais delineiam um sistema com nuances sociais, ambientais e econômicas interligadas, mas conflitantes, necessitando de uma gestão mais eficaz.

The Amazonian forest’s ability to provide environmental services is threatened by anthropogenic forcing at various scales, such as deforestation, fire, global and regional climate change, and extreme events. In addition to the impacts resulting from each one of these drivers, the synergistic effects potentially increase the risks. In the light of the above, this chapter aims to evaluate the future prospects for the Amazon in a scenario of 4 °C or higher warming resulting from anthropogenic climate change and the related hydrological cycle changes. Future climate scenarios project progressively higher warming that may exceed 4 °C in Amazonia in the second half of the century, particularly during the dry season in the region. Associated with these scenarios, it is projected a reduction of precipitation year-round, being a substantial reduction predominantly in the dry and transition seasons and smaller reductions of the order of 5% for the SH summer. Evaluating the consequences of such substantial climatic change, several negative effects in Amazonia can be anticipated, including short-term hydrological changes similar to the events associated to the extreme 2005 and 2010 droughts, and longer time-scale modifications of broad scale characteristics such as different biome distribution. Based on hydrological models, it is generally expected a reduction in river discharges associated to precipitation decreases and temperature increases brought about by projected climate change, but with the magnitude of the changes differing between models. The future climate change scenarios imply important changes in biomes distribution over Amazonia, with potential expansion of savannah and caatinga over large areas currently occupied by tropical forests. It is necessary a reduction to nearly zero in tropical deforestation and reducing land-cover emissions and mitigating climate change to avoid a dangerous interference with the ability of natural ecosystems to adapt to these possible changes.

Soil moisture is being monitored over the Brazilian semiarid since 2014 using a network of 595 stations. The network was implemented by Cemaden, the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, with the objective of monitoring of spatial and temporal patterns of soil water and potential impacts on the regions agriculture activities. The Brazilian semiarid is the poorest in the country and hosts most of the family owned farms in Brazil. Crops such as maize and beans are mostly planted over small properties with no irrigation. In this work, agricultural risk is assessed using measurements of soil moisture which are presented in formats that highlight spatial, temporal and short-term variability. The Soil Moisture Index (SMI), based on a normalization of soil moisture by field capacity and wilting point, is used to characterize the current soil moisture conditions in a scale proportional to the water available to plants. The temporal evolution of SMI is used to visualize trends in short-term drought and response to rainfall events at daily time steps or recent weeks. A novel index based on continuous exposure to critical SMI is developed to help bring awareness of real time risk of water stress over the region: the Index of Stress in Agriculture (ISA). The index takes into account continuous exposure to a critical value of SMI (assumed as 0.4), below which water stress is expected to be triggered in plants. The index was tested during a short-term drought over the region and successfully identified locations under water stress for periods of three days or more. The monitoring tools presented here help to describe the real time conditions of drought over the region using daily observations. These tools are expected to be implemented over an online platform hosted at Cemadens website.

The largest single block of seasonally dry forest in the world is the Caatinga biome found in northeastern Brazil. It covers 844,453 km2 and houses a high level of endemic plant species adapted to the low precipitation (400-800 mm year-1), high mean air temperature (26-28 oC), and elevated potential evapotranspiration (over 2,500 mm year-1). The Caatinga biome has about 55% of its original area preserved, and 45% with some degree of degradation related to anthropogenic impacts such as unsustainable natural resources management and land cover clearing for agricultural and grazing activities. Since 2012 the region has been experiencing the most severe drought of the last 50 years. Under this scenario, the caatinga vegetation performs a crucial role due to its capacity to fix atmosphere carbon dioxide even when water is scarce. Quantifying radiation, energy, CO2 and evapotranspiration in different caatinga areas is essential for a better understanding of their functioning and for evaluating possible changes in their interaction with the atmosphere due to dynamic climate and environmental change. Eddy covariance is a widely accepted method to evaluate energy and carbon fluxes over ecosystem scale, and was used to study two sites in the Pernambuco state of Brazil within the Caatinga biome. The first study site is a pristine caatinga (PC) located in Petrolina municipality, Brazil (09.03S, 40.32W). This site has an area of 600 ha and has been preserved for over 40 years. Its vegetation comprises a mix of shrubby-arboreal hyperxerophilic species plants with average height of 5 m. The second study site, characterized by 5 ha of degraded caatinga (DC), is located in Araripina (07.45S, 40.42W), about 176 km north from PC. It was used as a rainfed agricultural area during the 1980s and 1990s and has slowly been reclaimed by caatinga species since the beginning of the last decade. Micrometeorological measurements were conducted at both sites for an average rainfall year (2011) and an unusually extremely dry year (2012). The towers monitor turbulent fluxes by measuring three-dimensional wind velocity and temperature with an ultrasonic anemometer, and CO2 and H2O concentrations with an open path infrared gas analyzer at a frequency of 10 Hz. The collected high-frequency data were filtered, despiked, rotated, and corrected using standard eddy covariance (EC) processing methods. In addition, air temperature, air humidity, net radiation, soil heat flux, soil temperature, and photosynthetically active radiation were measured. Data were processed and analysed on daily and seasonal time scales. The dynamics of net ecosystem exchange and of latent heat flux (evapotranspiration) over these two contrasting land use of caatinga were compared for the two years with very different water availability, revealing the importance of long term ecosystem studies across the Caatinga biome and its various physiognomies.

Understanding how land use change can affect natural dynamics of water resources in Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado is of importance due to the constant pressure for deforestation suffered by these biomes. In this work, the dynamic vegetation model with river routing and flood dynamics INLAND-THMB (Integrated LAND Surface Model – Terrestrial Hydrology Model with Biogeochemistry) was used to simulate how land use change (LUC) can affect the water balance, river discharge and flood dynamics in the Amazon Basin and in Brazilian Cerrado. To achieve this goal, we performed simulations following the recent Global Carbon Budget Land modelling protocol (Trendy-v7) and compared the S2 (historical CO2 and climate and time-invariant 1700 land use mask) and S3 (historical CO2, climate and land use). Thus we can evaluate the effects of LUC keeping the information of dry and wet events during the period. To better represent the land use state in S3 simulation, we compiled deforestation information from the PRODES/INPE project in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado and produced a map with remaining natural area for each year. The evaluation was performed to each biome separately and also in some of their sub-basins. In the Amazon, we looked at the upstream Amazon Basin (Alto Solimões), which includes an area with very low LUC, and at the Madeira, Tapajós and Xingu all in the arc of deforestation and in Cerrado at Tocantins Basin. Preliminary results show higher river discharge related to LUC, as expected, and also less available water, since the ET decreases when we include anthropic changes in land cover in the model. It is important to highlight that this study did not include atmospheric feedbacks in the precipitation, which can mask some of the results, since considerable amount of the Amazon precipitation is provided by recycling as shown in previous studies.

Soil moisture variations and soil water potentials are crucial to understand the plant behavior under water stress conditions. Such kind of data are also valuable for modeling efforts in hydrology, ecophysiology, soil-plantatmosphere interactions and earth system models. Here we present soil moisture variation along the hydrological year of 2015 for 4 different soil profiles along a topographic gradient in the Brazilian caatinga, Sao Joao site, northeast Brazil, Pernambuco state. The data were collected using Sentek probes, Enviroscan type, in sandy soil profiles of 0.4 m (P1), 0.5 m (P2), 0.9 m (P3) and 1.10 m (P4), from the bottom to the top of an instrumented hillslope of around 1 km length. Along this topographic gradient, the maximum depth of probes installation occurred due to the existence of an impenetrable layer, commonly found in some areas of the Caatinga biome. Our results show that, during the rainy season, in the deepest soil profile (P4) from the upper part of the slope, soil moisture reached the maximum of 16% at the top layer (0.1-0.4 m soil depths), while below 0.4 m depth, the maximum soil moisture registered during rainy season were 6%. However, during the dry period, soil moisture at the top (0.1-0.4 m soil depths) decreased to values below 1 %, while the deeper soil layers (below 0.70 m) maintained moisture content at values around 4% for the whole dry period. In the shallower soil profile (P4), soil moisture also reached the maximum of 16% in the wet season along the whole soil profile. In the dry period, however, the top layer presented maximum soil content of 1% while the bottom (0.4 m) maintain moisture content of around 4%, similar to the deepest layer of the P4 profile. Similar behavior was found for the intermediate soil profiles (P2 and P3), suggesting that, independently of the depth of the soil profile, soil moisture at the interface soil/atmosphere present values below 1% in the dry season while at the interface sandy soil/impenetrable layer, moisture is maintained at around 3-5%. For the next steps, these results will be analyzed in terms of rainfall rates, soil physical properties and water storage in order to understand the water balance dynamic for different soil depths above the impenetrable soil layer.