Floods in Brazil generate hundreds of thousands of climate refugees

Rotten fish were lying in the yard. Sticky, foul-smelling mud covered everything. A lifetime of keepsakes – his daughter’s theater clothes, an old camera – were lost. As she searched through the trash, Silvia realized she could never return. She didn’t know where she would go. But this part of Porto Alegre, increasingly prone to cataclysmic flooding, was no longer home.

“No, I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t live with this fear of water, this fear of rain.”

For years, scientists have warned that climate change would displace millions of people, reorganizing human presence around the world as people sought safety. The World Bank estimates that more than 216 million people could being driven from their homes by rising sea levels, flooding, desertification and other effects of warming temperatures. The Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that this figure could reach 1.2 billion people. A future characterized by “climate refugees”, the European Parliament reported: was coming.

That future now appears to have arrived. Floods in Pakistan in 2022 displaced around 8 million people. Floods in Ethiopia in 2023 and this year, Kenya has forced hundreds of thousands more from their homes.

“Brazil will not be an isolated case,” said Andrew Harper, a senior official at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “What we are seeing is the start of a phenomenon that will become more frequent and more extreme and will leave more people vulnerable, with no choice but to move to a safer location. »

Floodwaters that surged here late last month swept away almost every municipality in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Entire towns remain submerged. The spared areas have absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Many say they have no desire to return to homes they consider unsafe. Officials are now openly discussing what was once inconceivable: relocating entire cities to higher ground.

Brazilians say the disaster represents a historic turning point, when the second most populous country in the Western Hemisphere is forced to respond to its climate vulnerability by rethinking where and how it lives.

“We are going to have to change our geography,” said Jairo Jorge, mayor of devastated Canoas. “The situation has changed. It will only get worse.

Silvia Titton, wearing a mask to dilute the stench as she rummaged through a jumble of ruined belongings, was already thinking these thoughts.

A neighbor who came to inspect the rubble of his house saw her and screamed.

” You are back ? ” He asked.

“No,” Titton said. “I’m not coming back.”

A city vulnerable to climate change

Rain patterns in Brazil are changing. The lush Amazon rainforest is increasingly affected by drought. Expanses of the country the northeast was first classified as arid. And in the south and southeast, rainfall increased both in volume and intensity, causing deadly landslides and repeated flooding in Porto Alegre.

The security of this city of 1.3 million inhabitants is undermined by its geography. Its extent, which concentrates half of the state’s population, constitutes the topographical equivalent of a funnel. Rivers from the mountains converge on the lowlands of Porto Alegre, where interconnected lakes carry water to the ocean.

The risk was contained, for a time, by a system of levies and dikes. But in recent decades, as basic maintenance of the system has failed, agricultural practices have destroyed the region’s forest barriers, and climate change has brought ever more devastating rains, the city has become the one of the most vulnerable in Brazil.

It was in these conditions that at the end of last month, heavy rain began to fall. In two weeks, the fall was greater than had been expected over an entire five-month period. The waters flowed into the Porto Alegre basin, where the antiquated hydraulic system broke down. With only one exit – through the Lagoa dos Patos to the ocean – the flood stagnated, a toxic brown stew.

Porto Alegre Mayor Sebastião Melo has been criticized for his failure to maintain a levy system that According to analysts, this could have prevented 80 percent of the city’s flooding. Melo said the system, built in the 1970s, was never designed to contain so much flooding. Rio Grande do Sul has been hit by three disasters in the past year alone.

“The system needed a billion dollars to fix,” he told the Washington Post. “I invested as much as I could, but I didn’t have $1 billion.”

Hospitals are closed. The airport has closed. People were stuck on rooftops for days. The looters stole at will. Criminal gangs transported drugs with impunity. Stores were searched for bottled water. The only passable road out of town was clogged with miles-long traffic jams. More than 80,000 people flocked to hastily set up shelters to the displaced.

“Many of these people will never return home,” Melo said. “There’s no point in them going back to the same areas.”

Daniel Jesus Ventura agreed. The 33-year-old electrician was taking refuge with his family at a university. His wife wanted to go back and see their wooden house by the lake. But he didn’t see the point. The waters had surely claimed him.

He wanted to leave the water, to leave the south of Brazil.

“It’s only going to get worse,” he said.

“We can’t live like this”

A team of disaster responders steered a motorboat into a poor neighborhood in the congested suburb of Canoas. Cars, houses, everything was under muddy water that health authorities said could transmit disease. The carcass of a horse floated in the darkness.

“This is just the beginning,” said Jenifer da Silva, one of the speakers. “Once the waters recede, we think we will find a lot of deaths. Especially the old ones.

They didn’t know what kind of city would emerge. Only it would be different.

“The wooden houses of the poor will be absolutely destroyed,” said Igor Sousa, another speaker. “When the water falls, they will demolish them all.”

Where the inhabitants of Canoas and other cities will go is not clear. For now, hundreds of people are believed to be living in tents, in cars or under a bridge. Tens of thousands more are in shelters for displaced people. Many others with loved ones.

The floods could soon recede. But the humanitarian crisis is only just beginning.

State officials want to build four large camps for displaced people. One in Porto Seco – Dry Port – where authorities announced plans to erect 5,000 tents and house 10,000 people for a year.

That could give authorities time, Vice Governor Gabriel Souza said, to study Rio Grande do Sul’s geography and determine which communities should be relocated.

“We can’t build the same things, in the same way, in the same places,” he told the Post. “We do not rule out having to move entire neighborhoods and cities.”

Others have decided not to wait to find out what government officials have in store for them.

Rafael Barboso, 30, sat in a flood shelter, planning his move.

“I’m leaving for Goiás,” he said said, a distant state in central Brazil. His reasoning, he said, was simple: “We know it and there are no floods. »

Nearby, Rafael Vitor de Arruda Arquino, 18, was already packing his things. He had secured a seat on a government-funded flight to Amazonas state. It would now be the home of him and his girlfriend, 16-year-old Thaiciele Silva de Castro.

“We cannot live like this,” Aquino said.

His mother started to cry. She had decided to stay in Porto Alegre, where she works.

“I’m not going to make it,” she said. She watched them head towards the door.

“We’ll wait for you up there,” Thaiciele said.

Then they left for a new life in a state where they hoped to be safe.