Recent mudslides, a freak of nature or new threat to Brazilians?

SÃO PAULO LETTER: Torrents have wreaked havoc with landscape and people. A warning system is needed

IT IS over two weeks now since rivers of mud crashed through mountain cities in Rio de Janeiro state and still the hunt for the missing goes on.

Almost 900 people are already confirmed dead but authorities say they are still searching for hundreds more whom family and friends have not seen since the early hours of January 12th. That was when torrential rain turned rivers into raging torrents of water and triggered mudslides that swept away neighbourhoods.

The hope is many of these are among the 30,000 people left homeless by the disaster, waiting to be reunited with loved ones. But the fear is that the mud is still to give up all its dead.

The trigger for such a calamity was a freak climatic event. Rio’s meteorologists say their weather models show the amount of rain dumped by the storm should only occur once every 350 years and was “totally atypical”.

The fear is though that this sort of freak event is starting to become typical. This year’s intense rainy season in Brazil’s southeast is linked to the appearance of the Pacific Ocean’s intermittent warming and cooling currents El Niño and La Niña, known as the Southern Oscillation.

Archaeologists say this Southern Oscillation, which disrupts global weather patterns, has been happening for millennia. Rio’s disaster could yet rank as the deadliest climate event in Brazil’s modern history.

But the Southern Oscillation is an old enemy. It is linked to a drought in the country’s northeast in the 1870s when an estimated half million people died of famine.

But most climatologists now agree the oscillation has become more frequent and intense in recent decades. Whether this is a result of global warming – caused by human activity or not — is a major research area of climate change science. And change is the appropriate word.

Half a century ago, São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city and economic motor, barely registered any daily rainfall above 100mm. Now it receives this amount on average 75 days a year, often provoking death and chaos.

Such change poses major challenges for all levels of Brazilian government which, along with the rains, must share responsibility for the high death toll in Rio. In the town of Areal, the local mayor sent out cars with loudspeakers telling riverside residents to move to higher ground as the storm approached. Houses were destroyed but, unlike in neighbouring towns where authorities showed no similar initiative, no one died.

Brazil’s government has long known that the country needed a national early-warning system. Indeed it was approved years ago. But it never received the necessary funding to become reality. It is not that the money was not there – Brazil is no longer a poor country. Just that priorities lay elsewhere.

Belatedly the government now says the early-warning system will be in place by 2014 at the earliest – another three rainy seasons away. This inattentiveness is all the worse since, having carried out the surveys, the government knows at least five million of its citizens, the vast majority of them poor, live in areas at risk.

These areas are threatened by the sort of flooding and mudslides which are becoming more frequent and which last year killed 473 people.

All this is a legacy of poor policy at the municipal, state and federal level that cuts across party lines. At least President Dilma Rousseff, facing the first crisis of her presidency, has called a spade a spade. And rather than focus on the freak rain, she has blamed the high death toll on failures in public housing policy. Having correctly identified the problem, she will now have to lead the effort to resolve it.

But it will take a generation to relocate the millions at risk. Many local politicians will be reluctant to do so. It is electorally unpopular to relocate precariously built slums in central urban areas to outlying regions further from work and public services. Despite the risks, residents are often unwilling to move.

Such challenges are not only faced by Brazil. The UN says chaotic urbanisation, hand in hand with environmental degradation and climate change, will lead to increasing numbers of deaths around the planet from weather-related disasters.

Such disasters can spur greater preparedness. The UN holds up post-tsunami Indonesia as an example which post-Rio Brazil must seek to emulate.

But the darker fear among many who monitor the skies and oceans is that if an increasingly hyperactive Southern Oscillation is an outlier for the sort of unpredictable climate change tied to human activity – increasingly as our ballooning global population pumps more carbon into the atmosphere – then better preparations will be the equivalent of using a paper umbrella in a storm.