Community-level responses to extreme flooding: the case of Brazilian Amazon ribeirinhos

Rural communities are among the most vulnerable to extreme climatic events but usually have context-specific knowledge on strategies to overcome impacts. We have used the Community-Based Adaptations (CBA) lens to explore how Brazilian Amazon communities have responded to extreme flooding in the last decade. Using a variety of data collection methods, including semi-structured interviews and validation workshops, we found a wide range of locally-devised coping, adaptive, and transformative responses, despite a lack of governmental support. A newly-proposed category of ‘annual responses' was crafted to describe short-term measures taken that were repeated when necessary, but were not fixed, allowing for flexibility and agility. Through our findings, we propose an absorb-cope-adapt-transform (ACAT) spectrum that captures the range of responses and the interplay among response categories. This spectrum highlights transformative responses which have become more important due to the increased severity of the changes experienced by communities. We conclude that the expected increase in the variability and unpredictability of environmental and social conditions will require increased robustness and flexibility of rural communities exposed to climatic changes. This will demand conceptual tools analytically more powerful to detect such systems’ attributes. We intend that our ACAT spectrum contributes to CBA research in this regard.