Royal Society: Amazon Native Peoples Reporting Manifold Changes in Humidity, Rainfall, River Levels

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“Indigenous groups who have lived in the Amazon for centuries, even millennia, are seeing signs that the climate is changing there," said Steve Schwartzman, lead author of the study and director of tropical forest policy at Environmental Defense Fund. “Indigenous people are telling us rainfall and river levels have changed; the fires they’re dealing with are different now; and the climate systems they used to depend on for growing crops have become unpredictable.”

In particular, indigenous interviewees mention concerns about drier conditions making it more difficult to control fires traditionally used for small-scale rotational agriculture. For generations, indigenous farmers set fires based on the position of stars in the sky — reflecting the time of year — with the expectation that the fires wouldn't spread into humid forest areas. But drier conditions today mean that savanna fires can easily move into rainforests, damaging them and reducing their capacity to withstand drought and future burning.

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"We know when it is time to clear gardens when we see a star (the Pleiades) that doesn’t always come out, only when its time to make gardens... When the star comes out in the middle of the sky, it’s the time to stop clearing for gardens," the paper quoted Sadea Juruna as saying. "In the old days the forest was much more humid and because of this only the part cut down caught fire. Today, all the humidity of nature dries up and more places catch fire... The star still comes out, but the rain is very different. Last year we planted a community garden... and it didn’t grow. The sun got very hot, because the rains were very late. The earth was very dry."

"Fire is different now. When I was little, people didn’t burn like now. The sun didn’t get as hot as it does now. It always burned and went out," stated Lahussia Juruna of the Xingu Indigenous Park in an interview. "Now, people set fire and it gets away and there’s a big fire. Before it would burn the savanna but didn’t burn the forest."

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http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0430-amazon-tribes-climate-change.html

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