Record flooding that killed more than 170 people and displaced half a million in southern Brazil is a warning sign that more disasters are coming in the Americas due to climate change, said an official at the United Nations refugee agency.
Approximately 389,000 people in the state of Rio Grande do Sul remain displaced from their homes due to heavy rains and flooding, which local officials said were the worst disaster in the region’s history. Scientists say climate change made flooding twice as likely.
Andrew Harper, special adviser on climate action at the refugee agency UNHCR, visited a flooded neighborhood in the state capital, Porto Alegre, over the weekend and called it “a ghost town.”
“It was underwater for almost 40 days. There weren’t even rats running around. Everything was dead,” Harper said in an interview Tuesday.
Since the flooding receded, residents have not returned to the neighborhood, where streets are littered with trash and waterlogged debris. Many still live in shelters, including Venezuelan refugees who had resettled in Porto Alegre.
UNHCR is helping the local government build temporary housing.
Residents in some hard-hit areas may never return, having been forced to move by repeated flooding, Harper said. But how many would become so-called climate migrants will only be known years after the disaster.
The floods exceeded all expectations local authorities had for climate disasters, and governments must do more to prepare for these events, Harper said.
“We are seeing the emergence in Brazil of what we may be seeing across the Americas. So by ignoring this, you do so at your own peril,” Harper said.
Governments need to understand where the people most vulnerable to climate change live, like the neighborhood he visited in Porto Alegre, and include those people in their climate plans, he said.
“It’s a warning sign, but we’ve been seeing warning signs for five or 10 years,” Harper added. “At what point do you basically have to slap someone and say, ‘Wake up, you’re not going to ignore this’?”
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