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Copyright of Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology & Society is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: The scarce knowledge about the drivers of demand for respiratory health care in the Brazilian Amazon, where the gap of human and physical health care resources is wide, is expanded with two surveys conducted in the west of the region, in Acre state. Potential drivers, informed by a review of twelve recent papers, were classified into seven categories capturing the individual, household, community and macroeconomic dimensions.Methods: Quantitative field surveys were conducted in 2017 and 2019 based on coupled conglomerate-quota randomization sampling. Adults responded about their own health or their children's health. The probability of seeking physician care for the latest episode of respiratory illness or dry cough was analysed with multiple nonlinear regressions, having as covariates the potential predictors informed by the literature.Results: The propensity to seek health care and to purchase medication was larger for children. Influenza-like illness (Despite the exact diagnostic stated by respondents being "influenza", a virus detection test (such as the PCR test) is not commonly applied, as informed by the Acre state public health service. In consistency, the term "influenza-like illness" is used.) was the most frequently diagnosed disease, followed by pneumonia, suggesting that a health care-seeking rate below 40% may perpetuate health impairment and local contagion. Illnesses' severity, including the pain experienced, was the main predictor, revealing that subjective perception was more influential than objective individual and household characteristics.Conclusions: The results suggest that subjective underestimation of respiratory illnesses' consequences for oneself and for local society could prevent health care from being sought. This is in line with some previous studies but departs from those emphasizing the role of objective factors. Social consequences, of, for instance, a macroeconomic nature, need to be highlighted based on studies detecting long-run relationships among health care demand, health and economic performance at the national level. Depending on the intensity of the trade-off between the costs imposed on the health system by increased demand and on the economy by the reduced productivity of the ill, policy could be adopted to change subjective perceptions of illnesses with nudges and educational and informational interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian Amazon provides important hydrological cycle functions, including precipitation regimes that bring water to the people and environment and are critical to moisture recycling and transport, and represents an important variable for climate models to simulate accurately. This paper evaluates the performance of 13 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models. This is done by discussing results from spatial pattern mapping, Taylor diagram analysis and Taylor skill score, annual climatology comparison, cumulative distribution analysis, and empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis. Precipitation analysis shows: (1) This region displays higher rainfall in the north-northwest and drier conditions in the south. Models tend to underestimate northern values or overestimate the central to northwest averages. (2) The southern Amazon has a more defined dry season (June, July, and August) and wet season (December, January, and February) and models simulate this well. The northern Amazon dry season tends to occur in August, September, and October and the wet season occurs in March, April, and May, and models are not able to capture the climatology as well. Models tend to produce too much rainfall at the start of the wet season and tend to either over- or under-estimate the dry season, although ensemble means typically display the overall pattern more precisely. (3) Models struggle to capture extreme values of precipitation except when precipitation values are close to 0. (4) EOF analysis shows that models capture the dominant mode of variability, which was the annual cycle or South American Monsoon System. (5) When all evaluation metrics are considered, the models that perform best are CESM2, MIROC6, MRIESM20, SAM0UNICON, and the ensemble mean. This paper supports research in determining the most up-to-date CMIP6 model performance of precipitation regime for 1981–2014 for the Brazilian Amazon. Results will aid in understanding future projections of precipitation for the selected subset of global climate models and allow scientists to construct reliable model ensembles, as precipitation plays a role in many sectors of the economy, including the ecosystem, agriculture, energy, and water security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary environmental arrangements generally coexist with State-based and private rules, creating a property rights system that legitimizes certain behaviors. In a world of positive transaction costs, legitimacy ensues from imperfect monitoring activities, opening room for opportunism. In this paper, we discuss how the existence of multiple rules in a scenario of high monitoring costs affects the performance of an environmental policy. We discuss the case of deferred prosecution agreements (TAC, acronym in Portuguese), which are voluntary arrangements designed with the goal of incentivizing slaughterhouses to monitor the environmental practices of ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon. More specifically, we study how the signature of a TAC agreement affects deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazônia Legal region at the municipality level. This paper adopts a difference-in-differences approach to analyze a sample of Brazilian municipalities between 2006 and 2017. Our results, which remain robust across alternative estimators and subsamples, show that the signature of a TAC agreement increases deforestation rates by 0.2 standard deviations. We argue that the signature of a TAC agreement, by creating an imperfect proxy for "good behavior" that enables both compliant and non-compliant organizations to access credit, may incentivize deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We analyze 12,000 parcels in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes. • Scraped weekly, our data come from online advertisements of land sale offers. • Hedonic analysis reveals low net benefits from formal private property rights. • Environmental compliance with the Forest Code does not alter parcel prices. • Results highlight challenges to property entitlement and environmental compliance. Lack of property rights is associated with lower investment, development, and welfare. In the Brazilian Amazon, insecure property rights have historically led to civil conflicts and deforestation, which would be expected to provide incentives for landowners to seek formal title. In this paper, we construct a novel database of land prices in Brazil to measure the market value of formal title to land and compliance with environmental regulation. Using online advertisements of land sale offers scraped from a widely used seller's platform, we first estimate a hedonic model that regresses the last offer price on property attributes such as farm-level agricultural production, land characteristics, structure amenities, and capital equipment included in the offer, as well as spatial and temporal fixed effects. We use this hedonic model to examine how property rights and environmental compliance capitalize into land prices across the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. Our main results imply low net benefits from property rights and low net benefits from compliance with the central Brazilian regulation that aims to maintain forest cover, the Forest Code. Finally, we estimate a duration model that follows the sequence of weekly offers for a specific property until it sells. Our findings show that parcels compliant with the Forest Code sell 46 % faster in the Amazon, while entitled properties in the Cerrado sell 9 % faster, unless they are compliant with the Forest Code, which requires a substantial portion of the property to be under native vegetation cover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas (PAs) in the Brazilian Amazon have proven to be critical in preserving the rainforest but face increasing threats. Since 2019, illegal activities and land conflicts involving PAs have escalated due to the weakening of environmental institutions. Therefore, up-to-date research is needed to evaluate agricultural pressures on PAs—including Sustainable Use Areas, Indigenous Territories, and Strictly Protected Areas—given its importance in driving deforestation in the Amazon, and to identify hotspots of concern. We analyzed property registration, deforestation, pasture expansion, and cattle transaction records within 158 PAs in the Brazilian state of Pará, which holds most of the remaining forest and the highest rates of deforestation. Our findings show that nearly a quarter of Pará's 2019–2022 deforestation occurred within PAs, undermining their effectiveness as conservation tools. Despite prohibitions, we found illegally registered private properties in most PA categories including indigenous territories and over a 100% increase in deforestation within PAs from 2015–2018. Over 90% of PAs contained pasturelands in 2022, but only half of them had registered cattle transactions within their borders, which suggests the presence of clandestine cattle activities in these areas as well. Indirect sales to slaughterhouses coming from PAs increased during the study period, potentially due to efforts by ranchers to obscure such cattle origins from companies that are increasingly monitoring their direct suppliers. Finally, we identified 17 high-risk PAs concentrating most threats. Focusing monitoring efforts on property registries and cattle transactions in these areas could significantly reduce illegal deforestation and illegal cattle ranching. While PAs are considered to be cornerstones of forest conservation efforts, our findings show that current policies fail to prevent cycles of land grabbing, illegal ranching, and deforestation that can eventually lead to the downgrading, downsizing, and degazetting of PAs. Given this context, validating property claims, tracing cattle sales, and penalizing deforestation are urgently needed to halt these cycles that threaten PAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic polymorphisms may influence mercury (Hg) toxicity. The aims of this study were to evaluate individual factors, such as the presence of the GSTP1 rs1695 polymorphism, associated with internal Hg dose and child neurodevelopment in indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon chronically exposed to Hg. Eighty-two indigenous children were clinically evaluated, hair Hg was measured, and the GSTP1 rs1695 polymorphism was genotyped. The mean age was 4.8 years, the median Hg was 5.5 µg/g, and 93.8% of children exceeded the safe limit (2.0 µg/g). Fish consumption was associated with Hg levels (p = 0.03). The GSTP1 rs1695 A>G polymorphism was in the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium and the highest prevalence of the GSTP1 AA genotype (80%) was found in Sawré Aboy, which had the highest Hg levels (10 µg/g) among the studied villages. The Hg levels tended to increase over the years in males and in carriers of the GSTP1 AA genotype (0.69 µg/g and 0.86 µg/g, respectively). Nine children failed the neurodevelopmental test, all of whom had Hg > 2.0 µg/g, and 88.9% carried the GSTP1 AA or AG genotypes, previously associated with the highest internal Hg doses and neurocognitive disorders. The genetic counseling of this population is important to identify the individuals at greater risk for neurodevelopmental disorders resulting from chronic Hg exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian Amazon provides important hydrological cycle functions, including precipitation regimes that bring water to the people and environment and are critical to moisture recycling and transport, and represents an important variable for climate models to simulate accurately. This paper evaluates the performance of 13 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models. This is done by discussing results from spatial pattern mapping, Taylor diagram analysis and Taylor skill score, annual climatology comparison, cumulative distribution analysis, and empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis. Precipitation analysis shows: (1) This region displays higher rainfall in the north-northwest and drier conditions in the south. Models tend to underestimate northern values or overestimate the central to northwest averages. (2) The southern Amazon has a more defined dry season (June, July, and August) and wet season (December, January, and February) and models simulate this well. The northern Amazon dry season tends to occur in August, September, and October and the wet season occurs in March, April, and May, and models are not able to capture the climatology as well. Models tend to produce too much rainfall at the start of the wet season and tend to either over- or under-estimate the dry season, although ensemble means typically display the overall pattern more precisely. (3) Models struggle to capture extreme values of precipitation except when precipitation values are close to 0. (4) EOF analysis shows that models capture the dominant mode of variability, which was the annual cycle or South American Monsoon System. (5) When all evaluation metrics are considered, the models that perform best are CESM2, MIROC6, MRIESM20, SAM0UNICON, and the ensemble mean. This paper supports research in determining the most up-to-date CMIP6 model performance of precipitation regime for 1981–2014 for the Brazilian Amazon. Results will aid in understanding future projections of precipitation for the selected subset of global climate models and allow scientists to construct reliable model ensembles, as precipitation plays a role in many sectors of the economy, including the ecosystem, agriculture, energy, and water security.

Despite legal safeguards, the Yanomami community faces challenges such as unauthorized incursions by gold miners, resulting in environmental degradation, particularly from mercury. This jeopardizes the health and food security of indigenous individuals, especially due to the consumption of contaminated fish. Ethnic and racial disparities persist in indigenous healthcare, marked by troubling health indicators such as malnutrition, anemia, and infectious diseases. This cross-sectional study, conducted in October 2022 in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Forest, Brazil, presented clinical, laboratory, and neurodevelopmental findings in Yanomami children chronically exposed to methylmercury. The results revealed that Yanomami children exhibited weights and heights below expectations (median Z-scores of −1.855 for weight for age and −2.7 for height for age), a high prevalence of anemia (25%), low vaccination coverage (15%), and low IQ (average 68.6). The Total Hair Mercury (Total Hg) levels ranged from 0.16 µg/g to 10.20 µg/g (mean: 3.30 µg/g; median: 3.70 µg/g). Of 117 children tested, 93 children (79.4%) had levels ≥ 2.0 µg/g (had no significant difference between sex). Among the 58 children for whom it was possible to estimate the Total Intelligence Quotient (TIQ), the average value was 68.6, ranging from 42 to 92 points (median: 69.5; standard deviation: 10.5). Additionally, the lowest score on the IQ test was associated with 5 times the risk of having high levels of mercury in their hair, 2,5 fold the risk of having an older age, and almost 8 times the risk of consuming fish, adjusting for nut consumption. Notwithstanding the study's limitations, results suggest that mercury contamination from illegal mining activities on indigenous lands may negatively impact neurodevelopment in older indigenous children, particularly those fish consumers, despite the inherent benefits of fish consumption. Addressing other socio-environmental concerns is crucial for enhancing the overall health of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vulnerability of the Amazon has widely increased with the COVID-19 global pandemic and with the dismantlement of environmental protection policies in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration. By contrast, local initiatives focusing on sustainable production, conservation, enhancing local people's quality of life, and supporting a more inclusive economy have emerged throughout the region and are building resilience in face of these disruptions. They represent seeds for transformation towards more sustainable trajectories from the ground up. In this context, women play a significant role, but their actions and voices are poorly understood, studied, or even considered. In this article, we use a novel approach to engage and highlight women's experiences by connecting decolonial and process-relational perspectives. Decolonial and process-relational thinking are closely linked in many ways, including in that they embrace difference as a mode of experiencing social-ecological relations. One particular aspect of this link is the shared focus on liminal thinking or thinking from the borders, what we call 'betweenness'. In our decolonial praxis, we highlight women's perspectives on their particular and diverse ways of life in the Amazon as they confront diverse pressures. To this end, we collaborated with 39 women from Santarém and neighboring towns in western Pará through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and facilitated dialogues. We discuss their perspectives on regional transformation, particularly the expansion of large-scale agribusiness around rural communities, and their understanding and responses to these changes. We reflect on the mutual learning experience resulting from the transdisciplinary engagement between researchers and collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of People & Nature is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Amazon, the largest global tropical forest, is central to counterbalance the effects of climate change. However, the extant literature has not fully explained the effects of demographic changes on land use and livelihoods sustainability that reconciles production and conservation. Using a case study of 28 years in the Brazilian Amazon, this article provided novel empirical evidences on the co-evolution of household demographic dynamics (composition and life cycles), land use and livelihoods as depicted by the demo-livelihoods theoretical framework. Methods of analysis involve the combination of exploratory (descriptive, cluster and correlation) and a multivariate hazard model. The results validated the demo-livelihoods theory and showed that livelihoods adaptation over time involves diversification combining perennials and cattle ranching, land consolidation and off-farm strategies (remittances, wage labor, cash transfers). These strategies are conditioned by demographic dynamics. Households are less likely to diversify livelihoods with annual crops due to unsustainable environmental conditions and costs associated with land intensification and market accessibility. While diversification historically occur at the expense of primary forest, household ageing may create a momentum to limit deforestation and allows the future incorporation of plot-based natural capital as a source of diversified, sustainable land uses and livelihoods for carbon emissions and bioeconomy markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to discuss the associations elaborated by riverine interlocutors between infrastructures and the landscape in which they occur, within the context of climate change in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Here, we debate the relational character of infrastructures, and how they act as important markers of river seasonality, landscape, people’s existence, and practices from the perspective of the accessed riverine people. This paper’s discussion is supported by qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and field notes from two riverine communities in the Amazonas state: Tumbira and Lago do Catalão. Inspired by authors who dialogue with Social Studies of Science and Technology and discuss infrastructures, their effects, their relational and ontological character, we seek to identify entanglements of landscape and infrastructure, and their implications in the practices and ways of living of riverine Amazonian people. Elements such as gas pipelines, power transmission lines, hydroelectric plants, cargo ships, and highways emerge, affect, and are affected in these entangled landscapes in the eyes of the riverine people. They merge with other entanglements such as the rivers and creeks that perform the riverine landscape and life. Thus, they induce reflections on such relationships and the affectations permeated by fears, wishes, and (dis)trust of their operation.

Mapping slaughterhouse supply zones is crucial for assessing cattle concentration, environmental impact, and promoting sustainable practices. This study combines cattle transit records (GTA in Portuguese) with rural property boundaries (CAR in Portuguese) to map these zones in the Brazilian Amazon. It evaluates the influence of Zero-Deforestation Cattle Agreements (CA) and explores the overlap between CA and non−CA slaughterhouse supply zones. Results reveal that CA slaughterhouse supply zones significantly impact forest preservation and cover a large area equivalent to entire municipalities. Over two-thirds of the study region, including most non-protected areas, falls within these zones. There is a high degree of overlap (95%) with non−CA supply zones, indicating competition for suppliers and limited expansion potential for CA. Direct and indirect suppliers are located nearby, with approximately 80% of indirect suppliers within 100 km of direct suppliers. Consequently, supply zones for both types of suppliers largely overlap. These findings demonstrate that assessing slaughterhouse deforestation risk for the entire supply chain in our study region can be achieved by mapping only the direct suppliers. This research provides valuable insights into cattle concentration, the effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments, and the need for sustainable practices in the slaughterhouse industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background The scarce knowledge about the drivers of demand for respiratory health care in the Brazilian Amazon, where the gap of human and physical health care resources is wide, is expanded with two surveys conducted in the west of the region, in Acre state. Potential drivers, informed by a review of twelve recent papers, were classified into seven categories capturing the individual, household, community and macroeconomic dimensions. Methods Quantitative field surveys were conducted in 2017 and 2019 based on coupled conglomerate-quota randomization sampling. Adults responded about their own health or their children’s health. The probability of seeking physician care for the latest episode of respiratory illness or dry cough was analysed with multiple nonlinear regressions, having as covariates the potential predictors informed by the literature. Results The propensity to seek health care and to purchase medication was larger for children. Influenza-like illness (Despite the exact diagnostic stated by respondents being “influenza”, a virus detection test (such as the PCR test) is not commonly applied, as informed by the Acre state public health service. In consistency, the term “influenza-like illness” is used.) was the most frequently diagnosed disease, followed by pneumonia, suggesting that a health care-seeking rate below 40% may perpetuate health impairment and local contagion. Illnesses’ severity, including the pain experienced, was the main predictor, revealing that subjective perception was more influential than objective individual and household characteristics. Conclusions The results suggest that subjective underestimation of respiratory illnesses’ consequences for oneself and for local society could prevent health care from being sought. This is in line with some previous studies but departs from those emphasizing the role of objective factors. Social consequences, of, for instance, a macroeconomic nature, need to be highlighted based on studies detecting long-run relationships among health care demand, health and economic performance at the national level. Depending on the intensity of the trade-off between the costs imposed on the health system by increased demand and on the economy by the reduced productivity of the ill, policy could be adopted to change subjective perceptions of illnesses with nudges and educational and informational interventions.

Corbicula fluminea is an Asian mussel that has aggressively invaded freshwater habitats worldwide, causing damage both economically and with the disappearance of native species. In Brazil, this species is present in almost all watersheds, including areas of Federal Conservation Units. In this context, the present work reported the first record of C. fluminea in the Carajás mosaic, Pará, Brazil, a Federal Conservation Area. Collections were made in September and February 2021 and May 2022. In total, 154 specimens of C. fluminea were collected. The size range of the specimens was 16 to 28 mm in shell length and 1.46 to 5.91 g in wet weight. This new record extends the distribution of this species in South America and in the tropical watersheds of Brazil and is the first record in federal protected areas, highlighting the need for large-scale knowledge of the environmental and economic changes that the species can cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic polymorphisms may be involved with mercury levels and signs and symptoms of intoxication from this exposure. Therefore, the aims were to describe the frequency of the GSTP1 polymorphism and to evaluate its effects on mercury levels and neurological signs in three Munduruku indigenous villages in the Brazilian Amazon. One-hundred-and-seven indigenous (over 12 years old) were included and genotyped (rs1695) using a TaqMan validated assay. Then, associations were evaluated by binary logistic regression, using odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). Mean age was 27.4 ± 13.9 years old, 52.3% were male, mean hair mercury concentration was 8.5 ± 4.3, exceeding the reference limit (≥6.0 µg/g), and were different among the three villages: 13.5 ± 4.6 µg/g in Sawré Aboy, 7.4 ± 2.3 µg/g in Poxo Muybu and 6.9 ± 3.5 µg/g in Sawré Muybu. The minor allele frequency of GSTP1 G was significantly different among the villages: 57% Sawré Muybu, 21% Poxo Muybu and 15% Sawré Aboy. Finally, after adjustment, GSTP1 GG and GA genotypes were associated with lower levels of Hg (OR = 0.13; CI95% = 0.03–0.49) and abnormal somatosensory signs (OR = 3.7; 95%IC = 1.5–9.3), respectively. In conclusion, monitoring this population is imperative to identify individuals at higher risk of developing signs of chronic mercury exposure based on the genetic profile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HTLV-1/2 infection is endemic in Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Its origin is attributed to the migratory flow of Amerindian ancestral peoples. The present study aimed to investigate the seroprevalence of HTLV-1/2 infection in Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon. A total of 3350 Indigenous people belonging to 15 communities were investigated. The investigation was performed using serological (ELISA), molecular (qPCR) and confirmatory (Western blot and/or Inno-Lia) tests to detect and differentiate the infection. The seroprevalence was 8.3% for HTLV-1/2 infection, with 0.1% of individuals seropositive for HTLV-1 and 8.1% for HTLV-2. The prevalence of infection was statistically higher in women (10.1%) than in men (6.5%) (p = 0.0002). This female predominance was observed in all age groups; in females the prevalence was significant from 41 years old (p < 0.0001) and in males from 51 years old (p < 0.0001). Here, we present a prevalence of HTLV-1/2 among Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon. The endemic infection in these groups must reflect the different epidemiological profiles observed in these peoples, such as sexual transmission through rejection of condom use, breastfeeding, especially in cases of cross-breastfeeding, and the high rate of pregnancy in the villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sustainability in Debate / Sustentabilidade em Debate is the property of University of Brasilia, Center for Sustainable Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)