In late 2019, Ana Paula de Oliveira Santos stood on a beach in north-eastern Brazil, cleaning up toxic crude oil with her bare hands. A massive spill had coated the coastline of Alagoas state, devastating the mangroves where the 52-year-old fisherwoman gathered shellfish. Months later, before the ecosystem and community could fully recover, the Covid-19 pandemic froze the local economy.
For coastal communities like Santos’s idyllic municipality of Barra de Santo Antônio, the back-to-back crises were an existential threat. But new research reveals the fallout from these twin disasters – and who they most affected – was not uniform.
This study was undertaken by the Pacto Futuro research network (RPF), which works on sustainability in coastal fishing communities. In tracking the economic impact of both events for 402 small-scale fishers across three Brazilian states, the research found this ecological shock had disproportionately affected women. The social and health disruptions of the pandemic were found to be worse for older men.
These findings, published in February by the journal npj Ocean Sustainability, offer a lesson for global climate policy: as systemic shocks become more frequent, emergency relief must acknowledge pre-existing demographic inequalities or risk reinforcing marginalisation.
The ecological shock: Fisherwomen hit by oil spill
The 2019 oil spill affected roughly 2,900 km of Brazil’s coastline, according to the Brazilian authorities. Its source was initially unknown but the federal police eventually blamed an oil tanker.
According to Pacto Futuro’s work, 30% of fisherwomen lost more than 80% of their income during the spill, compared to 22% of fishermen. This disparity stems from a “gendered” division of labour in fisheries, the study states.
Approximately 75% of the surveyed fisherwomen gather bottom-dwelling species such as shellfish in nearshore environments. Because coasts and mangroves act as natural sinks for pollutants, and many shellfish are filter-feeders, these habitats were heavily contaminated by the spill.
By contrast, men generally fish further offshore and target open-water fish. These animals, such as dolphinfish (mahi-mahi) and mackerel, were somewhat shielded from the worst of the toxic sludge.
Fishers’ skin was damaged by the crude and, to add economic insult to physical injury, their work was often in vain. Customers did not want fish that could have been contaminated.
We had to eat the polluted seafood if we had no other incomeAna Paula de Oliveira Santos, Barra de Santo Antônio fisher
“There were quickly posts on social media and in the media saying ‘do not eat the seafood,’” remembers Santos.
Before the spill, fisherwomen were already paid less than their male counterparts, the researchers found. The shellfish they harvested typically brought in USD 5.20 per kg (adjusted for local purchasing power), compared with an average USD 13.40 for finfish caught by men.
When the market for shellfish collapsed due to contamination fears, women were often left with nothing but their unsellable and possibly toxic catch.
“We had to eat the polluted seafood if we had no other income,” Santos says. “Everyone had fish stuck in the freezer. When they went to the open-air market, the people didn’t want to buy our fish because they were polluted.”
Men who fished offshore for the pelagic fish that had been less impacted were able to maintain more of their incomes.
The social shock: Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic – a widespread health and social crisis without direct environmental degradation – hit a different vulnerable group of fishers.
Bernardo de Barros, a 57-year-old fisherman who is also from Barra de Santo Antônio, catches shrimp and mahi-mahi from a boat. During the pandemic, the supply chain he was part of evaporated.
“It was very bad and difficult for us,” Barros says. “We would catch them, but there was no one to sell the fish to. We didn’t have a cold storage facility or anything like that to store our fish. We couldn’t even go fishing, because when we came back, people didn’t want to buy.”
The Pacto Futuro study found that age and location became the defining risk factors for economic hardship during the pandemic. Only 30% of older fishers said they could secure alternative income during lockdown. While younger fishers also took a financial hit, they proved more adept at finding alternative work or selling direct to consumers online, via WhatsApp or other platforms.
“In the case of older fishermen, it has to do with a vulnerability that is intrinsic to people around 50 or 60 years old,” explains Priscila Lopes, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and lead researcher on Pacto Futuro’s study. “They won’t know how to communicate adequately via WhatsApp or an app.”
Older fishers also faced elevated health risks that kept them indoors. To survive, Barros relied on odd jobs: “Sometimes we would mend nets, and then you earn a little something for the week.”
Chronic precarity and the limits of state aid
Lopes’s team argues that fishing communities exist in a state of “chronic precarity”. Crises rarely create explicitly new vulnerabilities but amplify existing demographic and socioeconomic inequalities.
Geography also played a vital role in determining who weathered the economic shocks.
Fishers in Alagoas and Bahia suffered heavily due to oil exposure and a reliance on group-based, labour intensive shellfishing. Those in Rio Grande do Norte were partially buffered by a younger demographic and a high reliance on commercial brokers. Often viewed as exploitative in traditional fisheries, these brokers actually served as a vital “informal safety net”. In Rio Grande do Norte, they maintained market access during lockdowns in a way that did not happen in the other areas studied.
State intervention largely failed to help, say many locals. Barros received two installments of government pandemic relief but eventually gave up trying to claim it due to logistical hurdles. “It was a huge bureaucracy for us to get it,” he says. “We had to go from here to Maceió [the state capital] just to have the correct documentation. Just on that trip, you already spent a lot of money.”
Rafael Almeida Magris, a researcher at the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), notes that coastal communities are uniquely positioned to suffer the most from marine and terrestrial degradation.
“Besides being the area where we have a greater dependency on fishing communities who are already naturally more vulnerable, the coastal zone is also where these oil-type impacts accumulate,” Magris says.
He emphasises that marine protected areas and marine extractive reserves, which both seek to manage human activities at sea, can help. These designations have governance forums, giving communities an institutional route to demanding accountability and mitigation during disasters.
Co-research with fishing communities
To try and understand vulnerabilities in fishing communities, the Pacto Futuro researchers utilised WhatsApp to conduct remote surveys. They distributed mobile phones and data plans to community members during the height of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – local fishers were elevated to the role of co-researchers. Santos, who is also the founder of the Coral Coast Fisherwomen’s Network (RMPCC), helped design the questionnaires and conducted the nearly 200 surveys in her own community.
“The presence of community researchers increased the trust of participants, resulting in more detailed, honest and contextualised responses,” says Monalisa Silva, a researcher who participated in the fieldwork. “It reduces the risk of misreading cultural practices, subsistence strategies and forms of adaptation.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the kind of extreme events that are already impacting South America are likely to intensify. With increasing temperatures, drought, coastal erosion, coral bleaching and ocean acidification, traditional fishing and those who rely on it will be hit hard.
As climate change accelerates the frequency of systemic shocks, the researchers and fishers agree that disaster relief must evolve. One-size-fits-all, top-down national aid often fails to account for things such as gender and age, meaning the most vulnerable struggle to get the help they need.
They want to see new initiatives that take account of existing vulnerabilities and disadvantages. For example, gender-responsive financial support for ecological disasters and age-focused adaptation programmes for health crises.
Without targeted state support, communities are left to fend for themselves and must petition for what they need. Santos says her fisherwomen’s network is currently drafting a proposal to request basic personal protective equipment, so they can be ready for the next environmental disaster.
“We need to make sure our governments – the community, state and federal – can have a different perspective on us,” concludes Santos.
“Fishing is not just an issue for the fisherman and fisherwoman. It belongs to the community. Fishing communities need something done, so we don’t lose what we do in the future.”
