The flooding and landslides on slopes, at the beginning of 2022, opened wide the urban policy that puts black and poor people in conditions of subordination and risk.
In January of this year, there was an increase in the frequency and intensity of the rains. According to climate researchers, summer storms are already expected. Why, then, do more floods, landslides and river overflows occur in peripheral areas of Greater São Paulo, such as in the cities of Embu das Artes, Francisco Morato and Franco da Rocha, than in neighborhoods like Perdizes, in the capital of São Paulo?
As the case of Perdizes illustrates, the occupation of steep areas is not synonymous with disasters. In several neighborhoods of the capital of São Paulo, the hills were occupied by the elites. In these cases, the fragility of topographic conditions was mitigated by public and private investments in infrastructure.
The lack of urban infrastructure for the safe permanence of housing in hilly areas is a product of the system that transforms the basic human need to live into a commodity. In this sense, these risk situations result not from a supposed lack of individual and family planning, but mainly from the housing policy aimed at the black and peripheral population.
The connection between the environmental agenda and urban planning is usually related to removal policies. To illustrate a situation experienced by thousands of families, we can take the AuxÃlio Aluguel policy in the city of São Paulo as an example. Of the families that received BRL 400 monthly from the São Paulo City Hall to cover housing expenses in 2016, 12,609 had been removed from favelas by the PAC-Urbanização. That is, the housing policy itself removes people instead of guaranteeing infrastructure for their permanence and, in exchange, passes on for years an amount whose value only pays rents in new irregular occupations, usually in risk areas, and often outside São Paulo. Paul.
In most cases of landslides, however, the victims are blamed, identified as people without a vision of the future. But, after all, what is the possibility of the future when the right to land continues to be controlled by a small group of landowners, and the only alternative for the low-income population is to subject themselves to the by-products of this market? Although housing is a right, in the absence of public policies that democratize urbanized land, land can only be accessed via the market.
It is unquestionable that this is a lack of vision for the future. However, unlike what the President of the Republic said, the lack of vision belongs to the State, landowners and real estate entrepreneurs, whose investments, unequal and unfair, cost the lives of those who need a place to live. The lack of vision for the future is also manifested in the absence of effective strategies to respond to calamities that recur every year.
The black and peripheral population has been feeling the results of changes in the climate regulation system in everyday life for some time. The hydrological conditions were also altered by the deforestation of riparian forests and large areas of forest, the straightening and silting of rivers and the paving of large areas. It is no longer possible to continue blaming the rains, as if they were something unpredictable.
We know that heavy summer rains are expected. What we have witnessed, however, is a greater intensity of extreme events. While southern Bahia and northern Minas Gerais experienced flooding and landslides due to the high rate of rainfall, the southern region of the country experienced the highest temperature indices in history, with hot days of 40°C followed by torrential rains. Researchers had already predicted and warned about this scenario. Why, then, is it still seen as an extraordinary case?
Risk is recurrently naturalized, as if it were not a product of social and economic relations, which, in turn, interfere with public and private investments. We are talking about historical processes, of which racism is a structural element, including environmental racism. Urban policy places black and peripheral people in conditions of subordination and socio-environmental risk to the extent that the safest regions were not made for them to inhabit and the neighborhoods where they inhabit are not the target of policies for adaptation and mitigation of the effects of climate change.
What will be the effective response of the authorities? São Paulo has a Summer Rain Prevention Policy, which works mainly with alerts and reception, but not with high-cost preventive actions. In addition, as pointed out by a survey by GloboNews, the government of São Paulo did not use approved funds to fight floods for 11 years in a row, between 2001 and 2011. Is it still the fault of the rain?
More than warnings, the black and peripheral population needs concrete actions that can save their lives. Before promoting removal actions, taking people from their places of origin and roots and throwing them into new dangerous situations, it is necessary for the State to promote effective actions, from the simplest to those that require high investments. Prevention, mitigation and climate adaptation actions are needed to prevent the most vulnerable from dying.
It is necessary to adopt social and economic policies that guarantee resilience and the possibility of rebuilding the lives of poor people living in risky conditions, victims of climate events. And, from a macro perspective, it is necessary to rethink the development model that takes us to the edge of the cliff, below the earth, buried by the impacts of major works, deforestation and the lack of socio-environmental planning.
The use by authorities of words like “extreme” and “nature” as justification for the landslides is nothing more than an attempt to explain their unjustifiable naturalization of death.
