Fishing and farming in the desert'? A platform for understanding El Niño food system opportunities in the context climate change in Sechura, Peru

周期性极端降雨事件，如南美洲的Niño厄尔尼诺现象，可在低收入和中等收入国家，特别是与Niño-Southern厄尔尼诺涛动相关的气候现象密切相关的秘鲁，通过洪水造成破坏。19世纪末，秘鲁渔民在秘鲁北部海岸首次发现了El Niño。然而，很少有人注意到这些事件可能给粮食系统带来的机会，特别是在干旱环境中气候变化的背景下。这一点尤其重要，因为这些事件有能力增加可用淡水的数量，并产生肥沃的沉积物，填满河流和湖泊的洪泛平原。我们的项目将对秘鲁北部塞胡拉沙漠的el Niño-food系统进行首次系统的跨学科研究。我们的研究成果将影响学术界和政策制定者如何设想与气候变化有关的未来挑战和机遇，特别是秘鲁北部的El Niño。它将重点放在研究较少的El Niño事件在某些情况下可能产生的积极可能性上，这在秘鲁北部对边缘沙漠生活社区有重大影响，例如渔民和农民，他们迄今为止在围绕强烈El Niño事件的流行减灾叙述中被忽视。具体而言，我们将(a)通过整合气候变化监测和湖泊沉积物记录，解构塞胡拉沙漠的气候历史；(b)通过殖民地和共和国的档案审查人类对El Niño的反应，并生成以前El Niño事件的口述历史；(c)通过混合方法评估当代粮食系统的做法，该方法着眼于气候变化对鱼类生态的影响，并参与绘制渔业/农业实践和资源/市场的地图；(d)确定沙漠- el Niño-food系统面临的挑战和机遇，绘制塞胡拉沙漠的社会和经济发展地图，并将其与报纸档案分析结合起来，从而制定未来的情景规划。

Cyclical extreme rainfall events, such as those generated by the El Niño in South America, can cause devastation through flooding in low and middle income countries, particularly in Peru, a country that is intimately linked to climate phenomena associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It was Peruvian fishermen who first identified El Niño in the late 19th Century off the north coast of Peru. However, very little attention has been given to the opportunities these events can create for food systems, especially in the context of climate change in arid settings. This is particularly important because these events have the capacity to increase the amount of available freshwater and produce fertile sediment that fill river and lake floodplains. Our project will undertake the first systematic, interdisciplinary research on desert-El Niño-food systems in the Sechura Desert, northern Peru. The outputs from our research will have a bearing on how future challenges and opportunities associated with climate change, in particular El Niño in northern Peru, are imagined in academia and policy. It focuses attention on the less researched positive possibilities that El Niño events can generate in some contexts, which in northern Peru has significant implications for marginal desert-living communities, e.g. fishers and farmers who have so far been invisible in the popular narrative of disaster mitigation surrounding a strong El Niño event. Specifically, we will (a) deconstruct the climate history of the Sechura desert by integrating monitoring and lake sediment records of climate change; (b) examine human responses to El Niño through colonial and republican archives and generate oral histories of previous El Niño events; (c) evaluate contemporary food system practices through a mixed-method approach that looks at impact of climate variability on fish ecology and participatory mapping of fishing/farming practice and resources/markets; (d) identify challenges and opportunities for desert-El Niño-food systems by mapping social and economic development in the Sechura desert and contextualising this with newspaper archive analysis leading to future scenario planning.