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COVID-19 (2022 Deadline)
Fishing for a “new normal”: potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable fishing communities in the Brazilian Amazon
PI: Renato Silvano (renato.silvano@ufrgs.br), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
U.S. Partner: Henry Huntington, Huntington Consulting
Project Dates: April 2023 - March 2024
Project Overview:
The COVID-19 pandemic hit hard on the people of the Brazilian Amazon, especially those living in small, vulnerable, and usually remote communities relying heavily on natural resources, such as small-scale fishers. There is a need for more empirical data on the pandemic effects on fishing communities in the Amazon and elsewhere, especially in developing countries where research capacity is limited. The overarching goal of this project is to conduct a broad and interdisciplinary analysis of the multiple pandemic effects on riverine fishing communities in the Brazilian Amazon, including the potential cascading effects on food provisioning, local economies, and aquatic biodiversity. This research will be grounded in fishers’ knowledge and individual interviews with households (men and women) to provide first-hand quantitative data to evaluate how the pandemic has affected fishers’ livelihoods, fisheries, and biodiversity. The study will focus on the rivers Tapajos, Tocantins, Trombetas, and Negro, which differ regarding the presence of protected areas, local biodiversity, and intensity of environmental degradation. The data to be gathered in this proposal will be compared with socioeconomic and fisheries data from before the pandemics, gathered in previous studies conducted by the same research team in more than 40 communities in these four rivers. This before-after comparison should provide new insights on the pandemic effects on tropical small-scale fisheries. The PI Dr. Silvano and his team will evaluate indicators related to fisheries, economics, food security, and the incidence of COVID. The comparison among multiple communities in distinct rivers and between genders should indicate potential effects of several internal and external drivers on how communities are affected by, or respond to, the COVID pandemic.
The comprehensive analyses on the effects of the COVID-19 on fisheries proposed in this research will contribute to improved understanding of how shocks such as COVID-19 affect key sectors (e.g., small-scale businesses such as freshwater fisheries) in developing countries (Brazil) and test approaches to help communities and sectors respond to and mitigate the effects of COVID-19. The results can inform policy decisions related to pandemic effects on vulnerable communities, fisheries management, food security and biodiversity conservation in the Amazon and elsewhere, hence supporting recommendations for developing or adjusting pandemic mitigation plans, from local to national scales. The project will also include a gender component, as the researchers will conduct targeted interviews to compare COVID-19 impacts on men versus women. The project will build upon the results from a PEER Cycle 4 project concluded in 2018 by the PI, which provides a pre-COVID database of interviews with fishers and records of fish landings in the Brazilian Amazon, to be compared with the post-COVID data from the current effort. The results should highlight fishers’ perceptions and concerns regarding the pandemic to inform policy actions and mitigation measures, either implemented or planned.
Summary of Recent Activities:
During the second quarter of 2023, the PI Dr. Renato Silvano and his research team worked to get the project up and running. They had experienced severe delays with their grant initiation process, so they only received their project funds in May. From mid-May through the end of June, Dr. Silvano assembled his research team, contacted collaborators from other universities and the U.S. partner Dr. Henry Huntington, and planned the logistics, requested permits, and started to organize the research trips to the studied rivers in the Brazilian Amazon. The team from the PI’s lab at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) includes 13 researchers (4 men and 9 women) working either full- or part-time on this PEER project. This group includes one post-doc, five graduate students, and seven undergraduates. In addition, there will be two collaborators from two other Brazilian universities who should more actively participate in the research, plus other collaborators who will help with data analyses. From July 18 to 27, 2023, a research team went to the field to conduct interviews with fishers in the Tocantins River, near the city of Marabá, Brazil. This group was composed of three researchers from the PI’s lab (one post-doc, one MSc. student, and one biologist), plus one collaborator from a university located in the studied region. Plans are already set for three more forthcoming research trips to the Tapajós (two separate trips to different river regions) and Trombetas rivers. The team received the required ethics permit from the Brazilian government to conduct research involving human subjects and are requesting a permit to conduct research with people who live in protected areas (this permit is not required in the Tocantins River).
Even before the project officially started, however, they worked on developing the questionnaire to be used in the interviews in advance. They also took advantage of the collaboration of the PI and part of the research team in other projects conducted in some of the same rivers and communities that will also be studied in this PEER project. During their participation in these previous projects in 2022, they conducted pilot interviews with fishers in some communities, which allowed them to improve and adjust the questionnaire. They could then collect useful data for this PEER project through interviews with a total of 117 fishers: 35 fishers (25 men and 10 women) in two communities in the Negro River and 82 fishers (56 men and 26 women) in seven communities in the Tapajós River. These interviews are all already tabulated and have provided preliminary results and insights for presentation in scientific conferences. These interviews had also advanced data gathering, thus helping the team to get all the needed data on time, even considering the late start of their project. During the July fieldtrip in the Tocantins River, the research team interviewed 71 fishers in five communities. These interviews will be transcribed and organized in spreadsheets in the next weeks. Therefore, they already have a database of 188 interviews with fishers from 14 communities on three rivers (Tapajós, Negro, and Tocantins).
Although the project has only been running for a few months, Dr. Silvano reports that it is attracting interest from key stakeholders. In the process of getting permits to conduct his research in protected areas, the PI was contacted by staff from the Instituto Chico Mendes para Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio), the Brazilian government institution in charge of the management of protected areas, including local riverine communities in the Amazon and elsewhere in Brazil. Their staff are keen to get outputs and results from the project to help them manage the protected areas. The PEER team’s research can be also of interest to riverine community organizations and other researchers in the region of the Tocantins River, near the city of Marabá, where researchers have previously issued a report about COVID impacts on fishing communities. One researcher involved, Cristiane V. Cunha from the Federal University of Sul e Sudeste do Pará (Unifesspa, Brazil), has been working with communities there for a long time, and she is a collaborator in the current PEER project.
From August 2023 to January 2024, Dr. Silvano and his colleagues are planning to conduct all remaining planned research trips to gather data through interviews with fishers in the four studied rivers. They will visit the Tapajós River from August 31 to September 17 and again in November (to visit another region of this river) and will travel to the Trombetas River from September 26 to October 7. A final research trip to the Negro River will be needed in January 2024, but the dates are still to be defined. The team will also organize and analyze all interview data from the forthcoming research trips with help from researchers in the PI’s lab. In November 2023, post-doc Paula E.R. Pereyra will make a presentation entitled “O impacto da pandemia de COVID-19 nas comunidades pesqueiras ribeirinhas do Rio Negro, Amazônia Brasileira” (The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on riverine fishing communities in the Negro River, Brazilian Amazon) at the XV National Meeting of the Brazilian Society of Ecological Economics, to be held in the city of Santarém, Pará. The undergraduate students on the project will also making presentations at the student scientific meeting of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in November 2023. Finally, the PI Dr. Silvano has also submitted an abstract for presentation at the 9th World Fisheries Congress, to be held in Seattle, Washington, in March 2024.
Back to PEER COVID-19 Grant Recipients
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