On 24 January Brazil’s regional development ministry announced that it has added more municipalities to its list of areas affected by climate disasters, advancing the process for these municipalities to receive more federal government support.
Analysis:
The federal government’s centre for monitoring natural disasters (Cemaden) released figures on 23 January showing that 2023 was a record year for the frequency of disasters, registering 1,161 occurrences, including droughts in the north and heavy rains in the south. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has regularly spoken of these increasingly intense and frequent climate events as evidence for the need for bolder climate action and environmental protection efforts. Since taking office in January 2023, one of the main victories he can point to vis-à-vis these efforts is the annual decrease in Amazon deforestation, to which his administration’s stronger protection of indigenous territories has contributed.
- The regional development ministry recognised emergencies in municipalities in the northern region (Pará and Tocantins), the northeast (Bahia, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte), and the southeast (Minas Gerais and São Paulo).
- Yesterday World Weather Attribution (WWA), an academic collaboration studying extreme event attribution, released a report providing data to support the scientific consensus that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood of drought in the Amazon River Basin.
- The WWA study, which was based on work by scientists from Brazil, the Netherlands, the US, and UK, showed that the likelihood of ‘meteorological drought’ (which considers rainfall deficit) has increased tenfold due to climate change, while ‘agricultural drought’ (which considers rainfall figures, evapotranspiration, among other factors relating to water availability) has become 30 times more likely in the area.
- In its report, the WWA also attributed worsening drought conditions to socio-environmental problems in Brazil such as biomass burning, corporate farming and cattle ranching.
Looking Ahead: While the protection of indigenous lands is a key pillar of the Lula administration’s efforts to tackle environmental destruction and decrease the risk of climate emergencies, farming interests recently contributed to violence against an indigenous community in Bahia state, with one indigenous person shot dead and several others hospitalised on 21 January. The federal prosecutors’ office (MPF) released a statement yesterday calling for authorities to complete the demarcation process for the indigenous territory in Bahia which has been threatened by armed cattle ranchers.
