- The 2024 extreme and historical drought that hit the Amazon exposed a chronic problem: access to drinking water and sanitation in Indigenous lands, where only a third of households have proper water supply systems.
- In some Amazon rivers in Brazil, cases of diseases related to inadequate basic sanitation, such as malaria and acute diarrhea, have been increasing amid climate change and population growth.
- Indigenous organizations have been demanding the implementation of adapted infrastructures in the villages, such as water tanks, wells, cesspools and septic tanks.
- The Brazilian federal government already has resources and plans to begin addressing these issues.
Mariazinha Baré spent her childhood bathing and playing in the Upper Negro River. Born and raised on the triple border where Brazil meets Colombia and Venezuela, she is now worried about the waters of one of the Amazon’s main rivers.
Illegal mining activities on the border region have been degrading the water in the Negro. Although scientists have shown the river is mostly in good shape, Mariazinha’s concerns echo issues many Indigenous people have been facing in the world’s largest rainforest. Water is getting scarce and worse, especially for drinking.
Mariazinha’s village is located in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Territory, whose watercourses shape the livelihoods of 23 ethnic groups, including the Baré people, which in the Nheengatu language means “people of the river.”
The rivers and streams are the basis of everything: transportation to the crops and visiting relatives; fishing, water consumption and personal hygiene. “For us, the river is sacred, because the river is vital,” Mariazinha told Mongabay.
This region is relatively pristine, with almost 99% of the territory covered by protected forests. On the other hand, signs of the climate crisis are already present: The Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Territory has lost a third of its natural water bodies’ surface area between 2015 and 2023, compared with the annual average in the decade between 1985 and 1994, according to the research collective MapBiomas. In addition, illegal mining activities in the border strip have degraded aquatic ecosystems.
“Our biggest concern is with the water. We always use the river water to drink and wash clothes, to make food, to bathe. But after a while, we started collecting rainwater,” said Marizianha, who is a Baré leader and the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Amazonas’ Indigenous Peoples and Organizations.
In 2023 and 2024, the Amazon faced two consecutive extreme droughts, bringing Mariazinha’s fears to a new level. The rivers, including the Negro, reached record lows and communities were forced to rely on provisions of water bottles and tanks as well as contaminated streams to drink water. The problem, however, goes beyond the weather events.
The Amazon Basin is getting drier. In Brazil, the rainforest lost 2 million hectares of natural water bodies from 1985 to 2023, a 16% drop, according to MapBiomas.
This negative trend began in 1995 and poses a severe risk for the Indigenous populations that heavily rely on these resources to live and adapt to a warm and drier climate.
The situation was never as devastating as the 2024 drought, according to Bushe Matis, general coordinator of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (UNIVAJA). Javari Valley, Brazil’s second-largest Indigenous land, is home to two river basins that are key to the livelihoods of more than 6,000 inhabitants scattered across 74 villages, in a well-preserved area in Amazonas state.
The igarapés, small streams of clear waters, are their main source for drinking and cooking, while the rivers are used more to bathe and dock boats, for example. But in 2024, Matis saw streams vanishing and becoming undrinkable.
The dry rivers and streams also made the villages inaccessible by fluvial routes, the main mode of transportation in the region. Isolated ethnic groups, such as the Korubo of the Itaguaí River, appeared in search of water and food. Two children — one from the Korubo people, the other from the Kanamari ethnic group — died from diseases associated with poor water quality, according to UNIVAJA.
“The rivers and the igarapés got a stench, a bad smell. At the head of the Ituí River and the Curuçá River, people reached out saying that we had to provide mineral water for them because no one could drink from the river,” Matis told Mongabay.
Logistics also contributed to the calamity. The Secretariat of Indigenous Health (SESAI) had only one small helicopter to operate in the region, which made it difficult to replace medical teams, refill supplies and deliver food as well as to transfer people who needed medical care to the Indigenous health units. The remote communities at the headwaters were heavily impacted — in normal conditions, reaching these villages by river can take up to 20 days from the town of Atalaia do Norte.
“It was really suffocating. We expected that in mid-October the river would be filling up. There was a sign of rain, but the river is still dry. This year was worse, much more than we expected,” Matis said in late 2024.
In October, the federal government released funds for emergency aid to the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples. In January 2025, the rivers and streams there finally began to recover.
Beto Marubo, who represents UNIVAJA in Brasília, Brazil’s federal capital, said he believes the 2024 drought made clear that the country’s governmental institutions, especially the ones related to Indigenous rights, are not ready to deal with the climate emergency.
“We know this is going to be the new normal,” Beto told Mongabay. “So the government needs to think about confronting these climate changes, providing conditions so that regions like the Javari Valley and so many others in the Amazon can be assisted. There is no guarantee that in the next drought we will have food supply for 6,000 people in one of the regions most inaccessible as the Javari Valley.”
A political fight
Along with the drying water bodies comes another important concern for the Javari Valley people: the increase in diseases related to water consumption, such as diarrhea, vomiting and dysentery. “No one is evaluating the water quality. Our only option is to consume what we have,” Matis said.
This reality in the Javari Valley is not limited to the recent droughts. From 2020-23, almost a third of the local population had cases of acute diarrheal disease, according to official data, three times more than in 2018.
“The historic drought of 2024 significantly aggravated the problems of access to quality water and sanitation in the Indigenous lands of the Amazon,” the Ministry of Health told Mongabay.
The ministry said the latest extreme weather event made it impossible for multidisciplinary Indigenous health teams to access the territories. Thus, it compromised scheduled health actions in the villages, hindered access to drinking water and food and delayed emergency transfers of patients to health units. Besides, it increased cases of acute diarrheal diseases due to the consumption of contaminated water.
In the Brazilian Amazon, only 27.5% of the Indigenous population has access to drinking water and basic sanitation. “It is a structural, chronic problem,” Sonia Guajajara, Brazil’s minister of Indigenous peoples, told news outlet TV Globo on Nov. 29, 2024.
The Ministry of Indigenous Peoples received 80 million reais ($13.8 million) from the Structural Convergence Fund for Mercosur. According to Guajajara, this money will enable a national program that, among its actions, aims to build drinking water supply and distribution systems for 98,402 people, 14.3% of the population in Indigenous lands in Brazil. The project is scheduled to begin in March.
This dependence on water bodies in the Amazon is due both to the difficulties of establishing the general supply network and to the geographical characteristics of the Amazonian territory, according to Marta Antunes, coordinator of the census of traditional peoples and communities, during the release of the data on Oct. 4. “There is a huge inequality in terms of access to proper water supply when we compare it to the situations of Indigenous residents outside the lands and the population as a whole.”
Capturing water from rivers and igarapés is not necessarily an inadequate solution. But permanent villages facing population growth require basic sanitation measures. According to official data, 33% of households in the Amazon’s Indigenous lands have no bathroom or toilet and 44.4% use a rudimentary cesspool or hole, while only 0.8% are connected to the general or rainwater network or have a septic tank connected to the sewage network.
“It is necessary to adapt the solutions for basic sanitation, such as, for example, making cesspools that allow adequate disposal without being linked to the general infrastructure of the region, which is sometimes further away from these lands,” Antunes said. “The other question is about how far public policy can adapt to account for the logistical challenge of culturally appropriate basic sanitation in Indigenous lands.”
Amazonas state is home to 40% of the Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon. These 146 territories cover 45.8 million hectares (about 113 million acres, an area slightly larger than Sweden). For Mariazinha Baré, it is urgent to think about public policies for capturing quality water for Indigenous communities, but also regarding the decontamination of rivers, igarapés and groundwater.
“We went through this drought and we know that this can be recurring. It is necessary to identify strategic locations and think about structural projects within these Indigenous communities,” Mariazinha said.
These actions must guarantee access to food, water and humanitarian aid to offset the high costs due to long distances and difficult access, she said.
“Our fight for water must be political. It is the assurance that our rivers will not be polluted; to continue sailing in the river, capturing the water from the stream. It is the right to have drinking water for today and for future generations,” Mariazinha said. “Nowadays, we are very worried. The river springs are located outside many territories, thus the waters enter the Indigenous lands already contaminated.”
Wells dilemma
In the Upper Negro River, in Mariazinha’s homeland, around 80% of permanent private households do not have a bathroom or toilet. This scenario reflects the high incidence of diseases related to inadequate environmental sanitation.
Half of the 3,400 households in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Territory capture water directly from rivers, lakes and streams, while only about 6% of the villages have water supply infrastructure.
“The Iauaretê people have wells drilled in the region, but they are asking to have their water analyzed. In Maturacá village it was found that the water table is contaminated,” Mariazinha said. Brazil plans to improve water supply systems in the Upper Negro region.
SESAI noted that medical teams and Indigenous sanitation agents distribute sodium hypochlorite for water treatment in the villages, but it acknowledged the need to “simplify the explanation about the maintenance and operation of these systems.”
For Mariazinha, it is also necessary to assess the viability of shallow wells, which have little or no water availability in the dry season, and also drill deeper wells and map the places that need supply infrastructure but have not yet been contemplated.
Mercury in the water
In the Madeira River Basin, Indigenous people suffer from additional water issues. Ostensible land-grabbing combined with the expansion of agribusiness contaminates rivers and streams with pesticides, and illegal gold mining discharges mercury into the water.
Mercury acts mainly on the brain and may cause effects like tingling, ringing in the ears, trembling, weakness, memory loss and cognitive difficulties. Children born with mercury contamination (the compound can pass from a pregnant woman to her child inside the uterus) may suffer learning difficulties and rare neurological syndromes such as cerebral palsy.
During the dry season, “the water gets polluted,” Nilcélio Jiahui, general coordinator of the Organization of the Upper Madeira’s Indigenous Peoples (OPIAM), told Mongabay. “And sometimes it completely dries; then we have to dig [wells] in the headwaters, but the water that comes out is not totally clean. It always gives us skin rashes, worms or other types of diseases when we drink it.”
In September 2024, during the peak of the extreme drought, the Madeira River reached 25 centimeters (9.8 inches), the lowest level registered since monitoring began in 1967. “This drought ended up harming us in many ways. We can’t sail to go hunting and fishing. The amount of fish decreased in our rivers,” Nilcélio said.
He lives in Pirahã Pikahu village, one of three in the Diahui Indigenous Land, in the Humaitá municipality, and the issues they face are not exclusive to years hit by extreme weather events. The Middle Madeira River lost 14.8% of its rivers, lakes and streams in 2015-2023, compared with the area in 1985-1994, according to MapBiomas data.
“In our central village, in the dry season we run out of water. We have to buy or ask SESAI for water. Here where I live, the river is dry and we can’t absorb the water, because there is no treatment.”
In the territories represented by OPIAM, half of the permanent households depend on these waterways for supply, according to official data. Nilcélio estimated that 70% of the villages already had artesian wells, but this infrastructure still needs to be implemented in critical places, such as the Juma and Pirahã Indigenous lands, inhabited by recently contacted ethnic groups.
In Diahui territory, Juí, the main village, is the only one that has an artesian well. “We asked SESAI to drill another well, so we don’t run out of drinking water during the dry period,” Nilcélio said. The government promised to improve water systems in the region by 2027.
Banner image: Indigenous members of the Kanamari Territorial Surveillance group are seen during a search for illegal deforestation in the middle Javari River region, in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land, Amazonas, Brazil. March, 2023. Image courtesy of Bruno Kelly/Amazônia Real (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
With half its surface water area lost, an Amazonian state runs dry
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