In Brazil, at least 116 million people have been affected by natural disasters in the last 120 years. With the climate crisis, vulnerability to natural phenomena tends to worsen even more.
This is what a survey by the British energy company Uswitch points out, based on an international database of natural disasters, such as fires, floods and epidemics.
According to the company’s survey, from 1902 to 2021, there were more than 15,000 disasters in the database. Of these, 251 occurred in Brazil and caused the death of about 13,000 people.
The majority (154) of disasters in Brazil are floods, followed by far by landslides (25), which are usually related to rainfall.
The end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 were marked by violent rains and floods in different regions of the country. Last year, floods in Bahia killed more than two dozen people.
Earlier this year, rains in Minas Gerais killed at least 24 people.
In the state of São Paulo, since last week, heavy rains and landslides also killed more than two dozen.
According to Carlos Rittl, a specialist in public policy at the Rainforest Foundation, studies, such as those from the IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), have highlighted Brazil’s great vulnerability to the climate crisis, which tends to intensify extreme events.
Rittl also points out that, in general, the most socially vulnerable populations are also the most subject to climate change. In Brazil, for example, this often translates into the occupation of risky areas, such as hillsides.
Despite warnings from scientists, the country has not acted to build policies that deal with the issue of climate change and natural disasters, says Rittl.
“People will not be able to protect themselves without public policy,” he says.
“The cost of inaction, the cost of dealing with the emergency, is much greater than preventing it. The economic costs will become increasingly high, but what we can’t do is, in 2022, to keep seeing the deaths of dozens of people in structured cities, like in São Paulo. Why do we still have a large urban center with so many deaths? This is very cruel”, he adds.
Uswitch also calculated a score for the most affected countries, taking into account the number of people affected, deaths, number of disasters and damage expenses.
The list is led by the most populous countries in the world, China and India. In the first, about 3.3 billion people were affected and 12.5 million died in 982 tragedies. In the second, 2.5 billion were affected and 9 million died from 757 tragedies.
In China, storms lead the number of disasters (319), followed by floods (311). In India, the phenomena appear interchanged, with floods in the first position (315) and storms (207) in second place.
In the ranking, which brings together countries with profound differences in population size and economy, Brazil appears in tenth place.
The disasters highlighted by the survey – which, it is worth remembering, is not a study published in a scientific journal, with peer review – are not necessarily related to the climate crisis.
In fact, the starting point for recording phenomena, the year 1902, is very close to the pre-industrial reference dates adopted to measure the increase in global temperature, derived from the emission of greenhouse gases.
Significant numbers of natural tragedies in Brazil have also been computed in studies by bodies such as the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). A survey with data from 2013 to 2017 carried out by the institute concluded that 48% of Brazilian municipalities were affected by droughts, 31% by flooding and 27% by floods.
The climate crisis, in addition to intensifying natural disasters, leads to impacts on the health of the population that can also cause deaths — more than 200,000 cases of kidney disease in Brazil in the last 15 years are associated with global warming, according to a recent study by example.
Another research recently published, in the journal Communications Earth & Environment (from the Nature group), pointed out that the destruction of the Amazon along with the change in the climate caused by human beings can leave millions of Brazilians living under intense heat, with thermal sensations that can approach or exceed 34ºC in the shade.
Researchers have also pointed to the potential of climate change to make the world more prone to the transmission of infectious diseases, with an increase in the epidemic potential of diseases such as dengue and zika.
According to Rittl, if in the coming years there is no resumption of public policies focused on the climate crisis, the Brazilian population will suffer a lot, especially due to the avoidable loss of life.
Source: Folha
