Social-ecological drought and smallholder vulnerability in the Central American Dry Corridor

Impacts from droughts are of heightened concern in smallholder-dominated areas globally, with climate change projected to drive increasing frequency and severity of droughts in the coming decades. Zacapa Department, Guatemala, has seen dramatic effects of El Niño-driven seasonal drought on smallholder agricultural systems, with reports of up to 80% crop losses in recent years. We assess vulnerability and drought impacts in these systems by integrating an ethnographic analysis of smallholders’ experiences of climate change in two adjacent communities in Zacapa with remotely sensed data on plant greenness anomaly and water deficit. Although recent droughts were not historically anomalous, we found increases in growing-season water deficit, which were particularly impactful to livelihoods and vegetation health. Farmers perceive recent droughts as more frequent and harmful than historic events and provide proximate and religious explanations for these changes, such as attributing droughts to local deforestation. These explanations parallel changes in resource access and vulnerability: deforestation coincided with declining access to high-elevation pine–oak forests, which show delayed drought impacts relative to agriculture or other forest types. We use this analysis to highlight vulnerabilities that produce what we call social-ecological droughts in Zacapa, where smallholders are highly impacted by declining water availability during key growing months. These findings suggest that, when looking at smallholder agricultural systems, drought measurements need to target the specific vulnerabilities of farmers to effectively track how livelihoods will be impacted under escalating climate disruption.