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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Andrew HendersonORCiD, Professor Andrew RussellORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.In 2017 El Niño Costero devastated the northern coast of Peru. This article seeks to learn from this experience for future large central and eastern Pacific-driven El Niño events. It directs attention away from dominant disaster narratives to reflect on the opportunities that El Niño rains have generated for desert livelihoods over time. We make a call for and set out the key elements of a historical geographical ethnography approach in environmental geography, which, as well as examining climate dimensions (paleoclimatology, dendrochronological, and atmospheric changes) of El Niño, also aims to consider its impacts on the livelihoods and management strategies of desert communities over time. We take as a starting point the responses of people who themselves come directly into contact with environmental change, yet whose agency and experiences are often marginal in knowledge production about El Niño. Responding to recent calls for qualitative geography researchers to be more explicit about how data are collected and analyzed, we explain how and why it is important to compare stakeholder interviews and climate records with newspaper archives and community memories of the 1983 and 1998 El Niño events. We illustrate that for desert populations in northern Peru, El Niño can represent abundance as well as disaster and make visible their role in managing change after El Niño flooding.
Author(s): Laurie N, Henderson ACG, Rodriguez Arismendiz R, Calle O, Clayton D, Russell AJ
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Year: 2024
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 12/08/2024
Acceptance date: 31/05/2024
Date deposited: 20/08/2024
ISSN (print): 2469-4452
ISSN (electronic): 2469-4460
Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2377222
DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2024.2377222
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