Francisco Correia da Silva, known as Chico, walks along the stones that were once a mighty river in Minas Gerais, Brazil. With a mix of nostalgia and sadness, he reminisces about how he used to fish in that river when he was a teenager.
Now 80 years old, Chico is known by everyone in the small town. Calm and with an easy laugh, he has never retired. He works as a mason, carpenter, woodworker, and even repairs the town's church roof annually. A deep knowledge of medicinal plants marks his life, and Chico explains that over the years, monoculture farms have cleared the land around the river's springs, which, in his view, has led to less rainfall and the drying up of the river. In one part of the river, a thin pipe can be seen, transporting water from a small spring to a family-run agricultural plot.
Chico lives in the heart of the Cerrado, South America’s second largest biome. Often overshadowed by the more widely discussed Amazon Rainforest, the Cerrado plays an essential role in the country's water system, serving as the source for many of Brazil’s major rivers and aquifers. The health of this ecosystem is deeply interconnected with the availability of water for local communities and agriculture, making its preservation critical not only for the environment but also for Brazil’s economic sustainability. For Chico, who has lived his whole life in this region, the changes are personal. He has witnessed the slow drying of the rivers, once full and vibrant, a direct consequence of overexploitation and environmental neglect that threatens the very lifeblood of his community.
What has climate change done here?
Seventy years ago, there was water. The rivers flowed, there were fish, we would fish, and we had agriculture, growing our crops... Today, there's nothing left because destruction has wiped everything out and continues to do so, day after day. Nature can no longer bear it; it has completely changed. Today, it’s drier than it is rainy. It rains far less than it once did.
This is the result of the imbalance in nature. Humans have disrupted the environment, and now there is no more rain, no more of what we once had. The waters gradually dried up, little by little, until they were almost gone. Today, there is barely any water left.
What do you think world leaders have to do now to stop things from getting worse and to help us adapt?
It doesn't rain because nature is destroyed. There used to be forests, everything was covered in forest, but today there is nothing left, it's all pasture, all devastated.
There used to be a farm here in the vicinity of 3,000 alqueires ("Alqueire" is a traditional unit of land measurement used in Brazil). They kept cutting, cutting, and destroying. It rained a lot, it would rain for 15 to 20 days in that forest. When it was destroyed, the rain ended, there’s no more rain. In that place now, it rains the same way it rains here for us, where everything is destroyed.
If you take down the forest, you remove the evaporation from the land. Then it stops raining. Today, clouds hardly form anymore to bring rain. How can it rain without clouds? There’s no way.
How to stop it from getting worse? By leaving the trees and protecting the soil. You can create pasture, but you don’t need to cut down all the trees; you can make pasture under the forest. Thin out the forest without destruction. It’s the same with pasture. Don’t destroy the riverbanks. Let the forest grow along the riverbank; the water won’t stay unprotected for life. It needs protection to keep it safe. In rivers, the riverbanks are where the water is protected, where the springs come from.
Life expectancy 2023
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