Percepção e estratégias adaptativas às mudanças ambientais : o papel do conhecimento ecológico local

Abstract

The present thesis part from the current concern to provide a better understanding of the factors that can shape the different meanings assigned by human populations to environmental changes facing community-level. For this scenario, this thesis was structured as follows: the first chapter provides evidence about the role of different religious and spiritual dimensions in the perception of environmental risk and adaptive strategies known by local people. The second deals with the relationship between some socioeconomic and cognitive factors as elements that shape (positively or negatively) the local understandings related to environmental changes and adaptive strategies. We also evaluated, from the perception of rural people, whether they recognized the limit and effectiveness of adaptive strategies used locally. In the third and final chapter, we sought to understand if rural people have been following changes in the availability of useful vegetation over time. To make it possible to achieve the goals we accessed the Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) of rural people, from individual interviews and participative workshops. This research had the support of rural residents of Carão community, Altinho in Northeast of Brazil. Our results showed that although people develop different ways of dealing with observed environmental disturbances, there is no guarantee of less vulnerability, especially in the face of climatic phenomena such as drought. Therefore, there is a significant relationship of different factors, such as the judgment of the perceived change as well as socioeconomic and religious/spiritual aspects that each social actor is submitted. It is also important to highlight that there are different dimensions of religiosity/spirituality, including religious/spiritual history, values/beliefs, commitment, and daily spiritual experiences that positively or negatively shape the wealth and sharing of perceived risks and local adaptive attitudes. Moreover, it is necessary to consider that knowing and quantifying adaptive strategies from LEK is important, but it still says little about the processes involved in the actions used by people, which can contribute to effective adaptive responses to the impacts of environmental changes experienced by different local people.