Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above.
Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.
Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.
“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who ... Read more
