The ancestral pottery practice of an Indigenous community in Brazil has come under threat due to climate change. The Waurá people, an Arawakan-speaking Indigenous group in the Xingu National Park in Mato Grosso state, have reported that worsening dry spells have negatively impacted the conditions required to create the freshwater sponge, or cauxi, that women artisans mix with riverbed clay to create their ceramics, according to Agência Brasil.
“Since 2020, we have been noticing that climate change is affecting [cauxi production],” Yakuwipu Waurá, an Indigenous leader, artist and language instructor living in the village of Piyulewene, told Agência Brasil. “As the river no longer rises for a [period] of five months, staying up for only three months and then going down, there is not enough for the cauxi to breed. It no longer grows."
She added: “In the place where we used to always get [cauxi], it didn’t start recovering until recently. But the cauxis there are too small and insufficient to cut, burn and mix [with clay].”
These ecological shifts have necessitated sourcing the cauxi from other sites, which has made the community’s ceramics significantly more expensive to produce.
Pottery is central to the cultural system of the Waurá—according to myth, a canoe snake deity called Kamalu-hái arrived to humankind carrying ceramic artefacts on its back, effectively gifting people the craft of pottery. When the snake departed, it left behind piles of clay on the riverbanks, securing a central facet of Waurá identity.
The community’s ceramics, which range in size and are used for ritual, dining and decorative purposes, are dried in the sun and meticulously scraped into the desired shape before being sanded and polished until they are fired in open air. Designs painted with natural pigments are then activated in the firing process, giving the pieces their distinct aesthetic.
In Waurá culture, women make the pots while men dive into the river to collect the materials.
“We take the clay and also cauxi. The clay alone won’t take shape. If we only use clay, the whole thing will crack. To prevent cracking, we use cauxi, which grows in the river marsh or on the riverbank. Cauxi breeds while the river is full. It stays there for about four or five months, sprouting. It grows and then dies. It dies on its own,” Yakuwipu told Agência Brasil.
During the week of 8 September, Waurá potters convened in São Paulo to participate in a series of meetings and workshops, using the opportunity to raise awareness about the ramifications of climate change on Indigenous traditions. Beyond the more extreme evidence of global warming in Brazil—including flash floods, landslides and desertification—Yakuwipu argued that climate change poses an existential threat to the Waurá way of life.
“We are concerned about the advance of deforestation around the Xingu. We never imagined this would affect the production of [Waurá ceramics]. We have always worried that this knowledge would be lost over time. But we never thought the time would come when we would be affected by climate change. The Waurá people live off what nature provides. But we are paying the price and suffering the consequences of the damage that others are doing to nature,” Yakuwipu said. “Unfortunately, you people don’t take care of [the environment]. You just abuse nature.”
According to the Climate Reality Project, Brazil is expected to increase in temperature by 2.2°C by 2050 without intervention. Between 2011 and 2020, Brazil experienced an average of 52 days of heatwaves annually, a dramatic increase from the average 20 days of heatwaves that occurred annually between 1961 and 1990.
Early in 2025, a heat wave in parts of Brazil forced schools to close, endangering the health and education of the population as well as the crops and livestock the country’s economy depends on. In spring 2024, devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul displaced hundreds of thousands of people and cost Brazil billions in losses.
In a study from February 2025, published by the United Nations’ Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, scientists found that Brazil has experienced a 460% increase in climate-related disasters since 1991, and is on track to lose as much as 7% of its gross domestic product by 2100 as a consequence.
