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，如南美洲厄尔尼诺现象产生的极端降雨事件，可通过洪水在低收入和中等收入国家造成破坏，特别是在秘鲁，这个国家与厄尔尼诺-南方涛动相关的气候现象密切相关。19世纪末，秘鲁北海岸的渔民首次发现厄尔尼诺现象。然而，很少有人注意到这些事件可能为粮食系统创造的机会，特别是在干旱地区气候变化的背景下。这一点特别重要，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，填满河流和湖泊泛滥平原。我们的项目将对秘鲁北部塞库拉沙漠的沙漠-厄尔尼诺-食物系统进行第一次系统的跨学科研究。我们的研究成果将影响到学术界和政策界对未来与气候变化，特别是秘鲁北部厄尔尼诺现象相关的挑战和机遇的想象。它将注意力集中在厄尔尼诺事件在某些情况下可能产生的较少研究的积极可能性上，这在秘鲁北部对生活在沙漠边缘的社区有重大影响，例如渔民和农民，他们在围绕强厄尔尼诺事件的减灾流行叙述中迄今一直被忽视。具体而言，我们将：(A)通过整合气候变化的监测和湖泊沉积物记录，解构塞库拉沙漠的气候历史；(B)通过殖民和共和档案检查人类对厄尔尼诺现象的反应，并制作以往厄尔尼诺事件的口头历史；(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，以及对渔业/养殖做法和资源/市场的参与性测绘；(D)通过绘制塞库拉沙漠社会和经济发展图并结合报纸档案分析确定沙漠-厄尔尼诺-粮食系统面临的挑战和机遇，从而指导未来的情景规划。

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.