Abstract
Socio-ecological systems (SESs) hinge on human groups and ecosystems, promoting interdependence and resilience to environmental disturbances. Climate change effects propagate from organism to biomes, likely influencing SES. In southern and relict patches in southeastern Brazil, Araucaria Forest is a typical SES due to the historical interaction between humans and biodiversity. We thus aimed to evaluate empirically and theoretically how climate change could disrupt this system by interviewing 97 smallholders and assessing their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We evaluated and measured the following: (i) socioeconomic impact of araucaria’s nut-like seed (pinhão) trade; (ii) ethnoecological knowledge about climate change; and (iii) generated an ecosystem services network. We projected these empiric data with a projected loss of 50–70% of the Araucaria Forest due to climate change to quantify the risks of the potential disruption of this socioecological system. We found evidence that to avoid the disruption of the Araucaria Forests is paramount to value TEK holders, safeguard the historical socioecological interaction, and promote non-mutually exclusive measures in an integrative response to maintain the Araucaria Forests resilient to future disturbances.
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Data availability
The R code to entirely reproduce the output of this study is available on GitHub: https://github.com/masemuta/disruption_af. Table data are freely available on the SIDRA – IBGE website. Due to ethical aspects, we will provide the ethnoecological data under reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This manuscript is the result of 8 years of listening, learning, and discussing with local smallholders and pinhão extractors of southern and southeastern Brazil. We thank them. We hope our research might impact stakeholders and politicians to recognize this vulnerable traditional group as a cultural heritage in Brazil.
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The authors thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES/Brazil; Finance Code 001) for the Ph.D. scholarships given to MMT, JAB, GDB, and APC. JAB is supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) postdoctoral fellowship grants 2018–05970-1 and 2019–11901-5. NP thanks CNPq for the productivity scholarship (process 310443/2015–6).
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MMT conceived the study. MMT and JAB wrote the original draft of the manuscript and conceived the main statistical analysis. MMT, JAB, GDB, APC, and NP contributed equally to the main aspects of the research: literature review, statistical analysis, and manuscript revisions. All authors edited and approved the manuscript.
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Tagliari, M.M., Bogoni, J.A., Blanco, G.D. et al. Disrupting a socio-ecological system: could traditional ecological knowledge be the key to preserving the Araucaria Forest in Brazil under climate change?. Climatic Change 176, 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03477-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03477-x