Social and health dimensions of climate change in the Amazon

Abstract

Context: The Amazon region has been part of climate change debates for decades, yet attention to its social and health dimensions has been limited.

Objective: This paper assesses literature on the social and health dimensions of climate change in the Amazon. A conceptual framework underscores multiple stresses and exposures created by interactions between climate change and local social-environmental conditions.

Methods: Using the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science, this study bibliometrically assessed the overall literature on climate change in the Amazon, including Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Environmental Science/Ecology and Public, Environmental/Occupational Health. From this assessment, a relevant sub-sample was selected and complemented with literature from the Brazilian database SciELO.

Results: This sample discusses three dimensions of climate change impacts in the region: livelihood changes, vector-borne diseases and microbial proliferation, and respiratory diseases. This analysis elucidates imbalance and disconnect between ecological, physical and social and health dimensions of climate change and between continental and regional climate analysis, and sub-regional and local levels.

Conclusion: Work on the social and health implications of climate change in the Amazon falls significantly behind other research areas, limiting reliable information for analytical models and for Amazonian policy-makers and society at large. Collaborative research is called for.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Amazon
• health
• multiple stressors
• livelihoods

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the United States National Science Foundation for supporting research on social-environmental vulnerability in the Amazon estuary-delta region (grant # 1342898 to Indiana University), the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP grant # 2015/02001-0) for supporting C. Adams with a visiting scholar fellowship and the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq) and the Cultural Anthropology DDIG Program at the United States National Science Foundation for supporting A. B. de Lima with a doctoral scholarship. The authors appreciate the invitation and opportunity to submit this manuscript to this special issue and are grateful for the informative and constructive comments received from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.