Half of Brazilians live at risk of disasters – 03/03/2023 – Daily life

Around a fifth of Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities, at least, are considered vulnerable to climate disasters related to extreme rainfall, such as those that hit the north coast of São Paulo in the last Carnival. These 1,038 cities concentrate 55.7% of the population and many of them are on the country’s coast.

The data are from Cemaden (National Center for Monitoring and Alerts on Natural Disasters), which monitors these places daily, issuing alerts whenever the weather forecast points to a risk of unusually heavy rainfall.

Among the municipalities are São Sebastião, Ubatuba and others in the region that suffered from landslides. It was through this work that the agency alerted the state Civil Defense about the occurrence of heavy rains and the risk of disasters. Vila Sahy, where most of the 65 victims of the tragedy lived, was cited as a high-risk area for landslides.

Most of the cities monitored by Cemaden are close to the coast, in the Southeast (403) and Northeast (333) regions. The most affected states are Minas Gerais, with 143 monitored municipalities, followed by São Paulo, with 127, and Maranhão, with 84. The list includes all Brazilian capitals, except Palmas and Brasília.

Regina Alvalá, deputy director of Cemaden, explains that this happens because, due to the colonization process, the main Brazilian cities are concentrated on the coast. In addition, it is also where the areas with the most pronounced topography are located, such as Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueira, in Minas Gerais. “So, that’s where you have a greater concentration of population in municipalities that can be impacted by disasters.”

Cemaden was created in 2011, after heavy rains that killed more than 900 people in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro. In the same year, the monitoring of 268 cities began, and in 2012 the number increased to 821, reaching the 1,038 currently monitored.

Municipalities are considered a priority because they have had disasters with deaths. Monitoring is carried out by mapping areas at risk, tracking rainfall in real time using automatic rain gauges and defining critical precipitation limits that can cause landslides or floods and flash floods.

In practice, this last item means that each place and each terrain will have a different level of vulnerability to rain. Thus, one spot may need much less rain than another for a tragedy to occur.

“If you have 100 millimeters in 72 hours in Campos do Jordão, for example, [a terra] can slide. In other regions, this threshold is even lower and with 60 millimeters of rain accumulated in 24 hours or 72 hours, it can already slide”, exemplifies the specialist. This risk assessment is carried out by analyzing 3,000 rain gauges throughout the national territory.

“So, we need to keep track of the rain that has already fallen, the predicted rain, the atmospheric discharges —that is, the lightning—, and the systems that cause rain, because they move”, he says.

For this safety net to work, however, it is necessary that the alerts issued by Cemaden and other institutions that work in this area reach the end, to residents of vulnerable regions. This happens through the local Civil Defense units, which must warn the population to leave the risk areas.

However, according to an article published last year, 67% of civil defense services in municipalities face a lack of funds, personnel or structure. Based on a questionnaire applied to 1,993 cities, 72% said they did not have their own budget for the area.

In addition, teams often undergo changes when the command of city halls changes and, thus, a network that already has deficits becomes even more fragile.

“Civil defenses need to keep their telephone or email information up-to-date where they can forward these alerts,” explains Alvalá. “It is very common that when elections for mayors and councilors take place, the head of Civil Defense also changes. When the secretary changes, the telephone also changes and what ends up happening is that this data is not updated.”

Another problem is that the list of monitored municipalities itself has not been updated since 2021-and, since then, disasters with deaths have been happening elsewhere. Examples of this are the Bahian cities of Amargosa, Itaberaba, Jucuruçu, Macarani, Ruy Barbosa, Aurelino Leal, São Félix do Coribe, Ubaitaba, Belo Campo and Barra, which totaled 14 deaths in the heavy rains that caused flooding in various parts of the state in 2021 .

“We have observed an increase in the frequency of extreme events in some regions of Brazil with torrential rains and deaths. Certainly, now, it is crucial to review this list”, points out the deputy director of Cemaden. “And it certainly will.”

Last week, the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, defended the declaration of a permanent emergency in the 1,038 municipalities monitored by Cemaden. The objective, according to her, would be to enable the development of continued preventive actions and facilitate the release of resources.