Abstract
Climate change threats agriculture, mainly in developing countries. Understanding the vulnerability of farmers is very important to counteract the negative impacts. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the degree of vulnerability to climate change of farmers of the Rio das Contas Basin, Brazil, based on their degree of sensibility, exposure, and adaptive capacity. Variations in exposure and vulnerability indexes between regional biomes were calculated. The sensibility index was higher than 50% in all municipalities. The exposure index was over 60% in most municipalities. A value of the adaptive capacity index, sufficient to reduce vulnerability, was not observed in any municipality. The vulnerability index was higher than 66% in more than half of the municipalities. Exposure and vulnerability indexes varied with the biome. The vulnerability is the result of high exposure and sensibility combined with low adaptive capacity. This suggests the need for investment to minimize these effects and mitigation activities to counter the negative impacts of future climate variability.
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Source: Author’s elaboration based on data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE 2010)
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We thank David Michael Miller, a professional editor, proofreader and a native English speaker, who reviewed and edited this article for structure, grammar, punctuation, spelling, word choice, and readability.
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This research was funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—CNPq (Grant Nos. 408382/2013-9; 306647/2015-0, 421791/2016-0 and 305807/2018-8), by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais—FAPEMIG (CSA-PPM-00022-14) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil - CAPES (Finance Code 001).
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E.A.S. wrote the draft of this manuscript. D.A.C. designed the study. E.A.S., D.A.C. and J.B.S. proposed the idea, supervised the whole work and contributed to the manuscript preparation. E.A.S. and D.A.C. performed a statistical analysis. J.C.Z. and J.B.S. discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript final preparation. All authors reviewed the final manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee [Research Ethics Committee in Research with Human Beings of the Federal University of Viçosa, under Opinion No.713.698 (CAAE: 30752814.2.0000.5153)].
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Dos Santos, E.A., Da Cunha, D.A., dos Santos, J.B. et al. Agricultural vulnerability to climate change in the Rio das Contas Basin, Brazil. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 19, 1215–1226 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03188-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03188-3