The landscape where the São Francisco River enters the Atlantic Ocean seems so out of place it makes one wonder if this is still coastal Brazil. White sand dunes stretch as far as the eye can see; clusters of cashew trees throw flickering shadows like ocean waves on the sand.
Here among these shifting dunes escaped slaves in the 19th century hid from, and out-maneuvered, the Portuguese who came searching for them. Eventually, the formerly enslaved founded the Pixaim Quilombo near the mouth of the river and developed a reliable sustainable lifestyle and community well attuned to the dynamic, always changing estuary.
But it is a lifestyle utterly dependent on the São Francisco River; reliant on the planting of rice in marshes downstream and on catching plentiful freshwater fish upstream.
Now, varied and growing water demands by upstream dams and other users are threatening the long-established quilombo lifestyle demands that experts predict will worsen severely in Brazil’s Northeast, one of the nation’s most climatically vulnerable regions.
We used to catch fish that were meters long, but now you have to go much farther up the river to find them, remembers 84-year-old Aladim, who lives in Pixaim and goes by his first name only. The fish left, so the people left, he remarks.
According to Aladim and Marise dos Santos Lima, a tour guide who works for the Piaçabuçu Tourism Information Association, about half of Pixaim’s population has already left for Brazil’s cities, as their two main livelihoods fishing and rice cultivation become more untenable.
There used to be about 100 families, now there are only a few, says Aladim. You are lucky if you have a son and a grandson that stay.
The lower stretch of the São Francisco River has suffered decreased flow for decades as hydroelectric dams, agribusiness and other interests have tapped into upstream waters. But a severe multi-year drought beginning in 2012, and considered one of the harshest in recent decades, if not of the last 100 years, has greatly deepened the estuary’s water problems.
The drought caused long periods of water stress, variability, and unpredictable levels and flows of the entire region’s rivers and reservoirs, leading to decreases in hydropower generation as well as rising conflicts between the agricultural and electrical sectors.
The drought reduced the water flow so much that, the sea ate the river, says Aladim.
During the past decades, the São Francisco River basin has encountered substantial changes due to intensive human activities such as river regularization [channelization] and damming, and more recently, climate change, explains Dr. Geórgenes Cavalcante, an adjunct professor of oceanography at the Federal University of Alagoas who has studied the river.
Decreased flow has radically increased the salinity of the lower stretch of the river, as the sea intrudes upstream, with potentially devastating effects on rice growing, fishing, the freshwater supply and public health. Aquatic ecology has suffered greatly, as fish and plant populations are displaced by salt and are replaced by opportunistic invasive species.
In 2008, a program for the rehabilitation of the São Francisco River basin was created, even as then President Lula proposed a plan to divert more of the river’s water to the Northeast via the São Francisco River Water Diversion Project the largest water infrastructure project ever attempted by the country, and parts of which are still under construction.
2020 Copyright Conservation news