Mitigating climate shocks requires understanding local perceptions: Long-term benefits of regional hurricanes outweigh short-term damages for traditional ranchers in Baja California Sur

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (e.g., hurricanes and tropical storms), are considered one of the world's most destructive climatological forces, causing substantial damage especially in urban areas. However, for some arid ecosystems, tropical cyclones represent natural disturbance events, providing important sources of fresh water that support ecosystem functioning. For subsistence populations living in these regions, it is unclear whether they experience these events negatively due to the associated damages or positively within a predictable disturbance regime. Here, we assess these phenomena with traditional ranchers from Baja California Sur, Mexico, following Hurricane Kay (September 2022). We find that despite significant damage caused by the hurricane, nearly the entire sample perceived this tropical cyclone event as a net positive on their lives. This traditional ranching population has a culture that is adapted to the seasonal tropical cyclone disturbance regime, and expects extreme rain events annually to support ecosystem functioning, and therefore their economic livelihoods. To these ranchers, the climate shock is not when the hurricanes come, but rather, when hurricanes do not come. We situate our results within a disturbance ecology framework, highlighting the role of increasing aridity and probability of drought in the North American Arid West.