Drought, Governance and Adaptive Capacity in North East Brazil

Around the world, the devastation of climate-related impacts has threatened livelihoods, ecosystems and the stability of sociopolitical institutions. Droughts have often caused serious agricultural losses and human suffering and the images of famine in Africa and human displacement in Northeast Brazil illustrate just a few of the hardships that are part of a much larger problem. In recent years, the possibility of more frequent and extreme events as a result of longterm climate change has fueled new avenues of inquiry to understand the vulnerability of different human and social systems to these events. And the growing recognition that some degree of adaptation to climate change will be unavoidable has increasingly moved the burden of action from the scientific realm to nation states, multilateral and bilateral development organizations, citizen’s groups and communities that will be expected to respond to negative impacts of climate variability and change (Eakin and Lemos 2006).