In December 2015, the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts for Natural Disasters (Cemaden) delivered to the municipality of Petrópolis (RJ) a modern Robotic Total Station (ETR), an equipment capable of detecting earth movement and thus helping to detect possible landslides on the hills.
But this February 2022, when heavy rains led to the death of more than a hundred people in the municipality, the equipment was no longer in Petrópolis, but in Cachoeira Paulista (SP), where a Cemaden unit is located. In 2017, the nine ETRs that the institution had spread to pilot municipalities in the country, including Petrópolis, had to be removed for maintenance and never returned, according to the director of Cemaden, physicist Osvaldo Moraes.
“These stations require calibration in the laboratory, but we didn’t have the budget for that. We prefer to remove them from the field than leave them there, depreciating. We didn’t have the resources to do this maintenance, and we still don’t have any resources”, says Moraes.
Cemaden is linked to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) and, according to data sent by the center itself to the report, in 2021 it had the lowest budget since its creation, in 2011. Last year, Cemaden received R$ 17 .9 million federal funds; in 2020, it had received BRL 20.9 million; and in 2012, R$90.7 million (the first year on record). These values are nominal, that is, they do not include inflationary changes.
For 2022, Moraes says that there is a forecast of a recomposition of this budget, with a total annual value of R$ 23 million.
BBC News Brasil asked the MCTI and the Ministry of Economy for positions on the budget cuts for Cemaden in recent years, but received no response until the publication of this report.
According to the center’s director, the initial years brought the largest amounts of funds; between 2015 and 2020, the values remained at the same level, until the fall in 2021. Cemaden was created in 2011, months after rains, floods and landslides left more than 900 dead in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro, an area from which Petrópolis is part.
“This initial budget was very high because it was intended for exactly something that Brazil did not have before. It was to purchase and install the monitoring network”, says Osvaldo Moraes.
Alerts sent in Petropolis
In summary, Cemaden’s function is, with its equipment, to monitor risk areas – not only for floods, but also for drought, among others – and issue alerts to the National Center for Risk and Disaster Management (Cenad), which then forwards signaling to local civil defenses.
According to a report in the newspaper O Globo on Wednesday (16), the Civil Defense commander in Petrópolis confirmed that he received alerts from Cemaden for the municipality this week and, on Tuesday (15), SMS messages were sent to the population.
However, director Osvaldo Moraes says that “neither NASA (the American space agency)” would be able to predict the volume of rainfall that occurred that day, nor the exact location of the disasters with precision: “We knew it would happen in the Serrana do Rio de Janeiro, but it wouldn’t be in Petrópolis, and being in Petrópolis, in which place.”
Meteorologist Camila Frez, who works in the civil defense of a municipality in Rio, agrees: “I was monitoring this day (Tuesday). about Petrópolis, it was really intense.”
Frez explains that a 2012 law established that civil protection and defense are a shared responsibility between the federal government, states and municipalities, although each of these has its specific functions. For example, the Union is responsible for establishing norms and criteria in the area – such as what are the criteria for declaring public calamity. It also, in practice, structures systems such as Cemaden itself and the Public Alerts Disclosure Interface (Idap), which allows the sending of alerts to the population through SMS and Pay TV.
The states must help the municipalities in the elaboration of contingency plans and mapping of risk areas, in addition to articulating the actions of the Union and cities in their territory. At the other end, municipalities are responsible for mapping risk areas, performing simulations with the population and providing emergency assistance.
“When we think that most municipalities do not have technical teams within the municipal civil defenses, Cemaden helps a lot, because they have these specialists. And often (cities) do not have the investment to acquire monitoring equipment, so Cemaden helps with that too, because they have hydrological, geological and meteorological equipment”, explains the meteorologist, a specialist in civil defense.
But the director of the institution himself says that Cemaden’s coverage is insufficient to reach all Brazilian municipalities.
“We have more than 5,000 municipalities in Brazil, and the Cemaden network covers only 30% of them. We don’t have the budget to expand the monitoring network. This is a bottleneck”, says Osvaldo Moraes.
According to the physicist in charge of the institution, the budget of recent years has made it possible to maintain the structure that already exists – even so, not in an ideal way.
“The equipment degrades over time, we cannot replace what we have. And we have a technological gap: there is more modern equipment that could be acquired, to replace the current network.”
“We have a network of automatic rain gauges that is 10 years old, and certainly today there are other more modern technologies that could replace this equipment, with lower maintenance costs, greater durability and reliability”, he points out.
The cuts for Cemaden are part of a context of budget reduction for the entire Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in 2021.
Spotlights and figures that disappear little by little
President of the National Confederation of Municipalities (CNM), Paulo Ziulkoski says that there are also insufficient funds, and in some cases almost zero, for the prevention and management of disasters aimed at municipalities – where “everything breaks down” in these situations.
“Any fact or act always takes place in a municipality, and that’s where the citizen lives. The Union is thousands of kilometers away, the state is in the capital, so logically the closest power to which the citizen goes is the city hall,” points out Ziulkoski.
“The National Civil Defense and Protection System says that the Union would share responsibilities, provide technical and financial assistance. But the technique is for the English to see, and money has even less.”
“The municipality has no resources, so prevention is not carried out. This is repeated. Unfortunately, we have to say that this (tragedy as in Petrópolis) will repeat itself”, he laments.
“It is no use for the law to say that it is the municipality that has to map risk areas. The person has nowhere to live and goes to a hillside, an area of risk, and there is no resource for (the municipality) to provide housing in another region with more security.”
The president of the CNM also complains that every time a major natural disaster happens, politicians from the federal and state spheres promise funds – which, according to him, disappear a little more each year.
“The amount decreases until the rest never comes, it remains in the remainder to be paid”, points out Ziulkoski, remembering the Special Fund for Public Disasters (Funcap) which, in practice, “no longer has any recourse”.
An example of this appeared in a survey carried out by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo on the Transparency Portal, which showed this Wednesday (16) that only 47% of the estimated amount (R$ 192.8 million out of R$ 407.8 million) for the disaster prevention and response program of the state government of Rio was in fact committed in 2021.
In a note sent to BBC News Brasil, the state government of Rio stated that “even with several financial restrictions in 2021” it invested “more than R$ 300 million in almost 30 actions related to the prevention of disasters and emergencies in the Serrana Region”.
“In this year 2022, in just two months, the government has already committed R$ 115 million, 1/4 of what was invested in 2021, with the prospect of investing almost R$ 1 billion in the region”, completes the note.
More extreme events forecast
Meteorologist Camila Frez says that while governments need to promote structural measures such as preventing housing in risk areas, non-structural measures such as issuing alerts are also “essential”.
“As we cannot totally eliminate the risks, carrying out all the (structural) works are non-structural measures that will minimize the risks of disasters”, says the specialist, highlighting the importance of the population registering to receive alerts in their cities by sending a free SMS message to the number 40199 with the zip code of the address.
For Frez, solutions like these, structural or non-structural, involving governments and the population, will be increasingly necessary.
“The number and frequency of natural disasters is increasing. With the problem of climate change, we will have more and more extreme events happening – from drought to heavy rains.”
