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International audienceDuring the last decades, several climate-modelling studies have forecasted a decrease in precipitation inSouthern Amazonia, projecting scenarios of a drier Amazon for the future in relation with deforestation (or forest cover).In this area, only a limited number of analyses using forest cover data and rainfall time series have considered the transitionalzones between the Amazon Forest and the Cerrado biome. In this work, we evaluated whether forest cover and rainfall patternsare correlated. The analysis encompassed rainfall times series from 207 rain gauges during the 1971–2010 period, and forestcover data acquired from LANDSAT5 satellite images. The results indicate that, at local level (1–15 km), both seasonal andannual precipitation values are not correlated to forest cover, whereas at the regional scale (30–50 km) contrasting to annualvalues, significant correlation occurs between forest cover and seasonal precipitation. Additionally, the study suggests that thelarger the forest areas, the greater the probabilities of those influencing precipitation at regional scale, in opposite direction tothe observed local level effects

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Commodity prices, exchange rate, infrastructural projects and migration patterns are known and important drivers of Amazon deforestation, but cannot solely explain the high rates observed in 1995 and 2003-2004 in six Brazilian Amazon states. Deforestation predictions using those widely applied drivers can underestimate deforestation rates by as much as 50%. We show that years with the highest deforestation rates also correlate with large administrative shifts caused by presidential elections which results in periods of managerial instability associated with episodic inefficiency, leading to weak institutions unable to properly combat illegal deforestation. Although surveillance and regulatory action plans to combat deforestation have held back deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, our results suggest that environmental management institutions should be aware such administration shifts set a burden on the policy targets associated with conservation policies. Institutional vulnerability immediately after major elections is an acknowledged fact in Brazil, though it has been mostly disregarded as an indicator of ecological threat.

The Semi-Arid region of Brazil (SAB) has been periodically affected by moderate to extreme droughts, jeopardizing livelihoods and severely impacting the life standards of millions of family farmers. In the early 1990s the Human Coexistence with Semi-Aridity (HCSA) emerged as a development approach. The debate on HCSA is limited to Brazilian literature but as a technological and a bottom-up governance experience, researches on the topic could add some insights to international debate on living with drought. The present paper adopts an historical perspective on HCSA before discussing the main HCSA's rainwater-harvesting methods found in two case studies in the SAB as a local appropriate and advanced technological package for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Qualitative analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with key local stakeholders, 29 unstructured interviews with family farmers, and surveys in 499 family farms are used. The results show that regardless the highly adaptive potential, the technologies are adopted in differ rates among them and in between case studies chosen, influenced by non-technological factors and interacting the broader public policies context. Scaling up the HCSA's technologies in the rural SAB is a development path towards the SDGs.

In Brazil, droughts are widespread and recurrent in the semiarid region, mainly due to its water vulnerability. Approximately 28 million people live in the region, which concentrates the highest proportion of people living in poverty in Brazil. If drought occurs intensively and extensively in densely populated areas, it can result in disaster when local capacities are insufficient to avoid significant damage. The risks associated with drought are related to the natural hazard, local vulnerabilities, response capacity, and mitigation policies. This study presents the challenges for the consolidation of a drought risk warning system in Brazil and proposes an initial structure for assigning responsibilities among the national institutions involved in the theme in order to guide actions for the risk mitigation.

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