Floods in Rio Grande do Sul reveal flaws in Brazil’s disaster risk management policy

State coordination will be essential to overcome the problems in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, as Acre’s experience with floods shows.

Agência FAPESP* – Since 2012, Brazil has had a national public policy for disaster risk management, the National Policy for Civil Protection and Defense (PNPDEC), which provides for the intergovernmental development of a set of actions for prevention, mitigation, emergency preparedness, response, and recovery after socio-environmental disasters, such as floods.

Despite representing legal advances, the operationalization of this policy faces numerous challenges, which contributes to slower, uncoordinated, and less effective responses to tragedies such as the one that occurred in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (southern region of the country), as well as not helping in the design of good planning to support preventive actions.

This is pointed out in an article published in the journal Agenda Política by Catarina Ianni Segatto and Fernanda Lima-Silva, researchers at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM) – a FAPESP Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Center (RIDC) based at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH-USP) and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP).

The text, also signed by André Luis Nogueira da Silva of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), discusses the different patterns of state coordination in the implementation of public policies. The study examines three cases: coordination in education policy in the state of Ceará, health policy in the state of São Paulo, and civil protection and defense policy in the state of Acre. These are policies with different degrees of federal coordination and state coordination patterns.

Reflections on Acre’s civil protection and defense policy offer a number of lessons not only for the case of Rio Grande do Sul, but also for other municipalities, states, and the federal government. This area of public policy was selected for the study because it is a sector with little effective national coordination, low sub-national government capacities, and different trajectories of state coordination. In Acre, the issue gained relevance in a specific context – in this case, the historic floods of the 2010s in the capital, Rio Branco.

In the article, the researchers first analyzed national coordination at the federal level before discussing aspects related to the state level. “In the case of civil protection and defense, we found that national coordination is very much in its infancy. There’s an attempt to move forward with the creation of a national policy, but there are no financial incentives or instruments to ensure the building of state capacities and the implementation of specific policies,” Segatto points out.

As far as state coordination is concerned, the condition is repeated: it is fragile, not only in Rio Grande do Sul, nor only in the civil protection and defense policy. “While national coordination is fragile, there is no clarity about the role of the state in coordinating policies and actions with the municipalities, and this is not exclusive to this [public] policy. The lack of clarity about the role of the states in regional coordination occurs in public policies in various areas,” says Segatto.

Lima-Silva recalls that the most recent framework, which defines the responsibilities of the state and municipalities in the area of civil protection and defense, has created overlaps. “Within this arrangement, in which there are few elements to guide behavior, who ends up doing what in each context varies greatly from case to case,” she points out. According to her, in situations like this, there is room for one actor to blame the other if something is not done, as was observed in the case of Rio Grande do Sul.

Civil defense in Acre as an example

According to Lima-Silva, Acre became interesting as an object of study because of the emergency situation of the floods of 2012 and 2015, in which the state took on a leading role that it had not exercised before, especially when it began to develop joint actions between the Civil Defense and the State Environmental Department, based on the intensive use of data. “This case teaches us that it’s possible, based on data and inter-institutional coordination, to create new patterns of state coordination and planning of actions to deal with risks, sharing them with different state and non-state actors to anticipate scenarios and better plan what can be done in each of them,” she adds.

One example is the system for monitoring the level of the Acre River. When it rains upstream, it is possible to know how much the river level will rise in Rio Branco, how long this will take, and which areas of the city will be flooded. “By combining the data, estimates can be made that allow the state and municipal governments to take practical measures in advance, such as preparing shelters, deploying firefighters and civil defense teams, warning schools and residents of the neighborhoods that will be affected, etc.,” she explains.

The production of data alone is not enough: technicians and political actors must be able to look at this information, assess its quality and reliability, and make decisions based on it. “In Rio Grande do Sul, data circulated and could’ve been used more effectively in decision-making during the rains. We also didn’t see significant coordination with civil society, something that guarantees capillarity,” adds Lima-Silva.

In addition to producing data and knowing how to interpret them, the work must be coordinated between the different spheres, and communication with the population needs to be clear and agile. “In Rio Grande do Sul, there doesn’t seem to have been clear communication to those who would be most affected by the decisions made in relation to the data produced,” Segatto points out.

For the researchers, the state coordination observed in Acre seems to have been weakened in the southern state. With an aggravating factor, according to Segatto: the attention attracted and the seriousness of the events led to uncooperative federal coordination between the three spheres that could have provided faster and more effective responses.

Segatto points out that, unfortunately, this will not be the last occurrence of climatic extremes in Rio Grande do Sul. “We must not only think about investments to respond to the effects of the tragedy but also take advantage of this crisis to work on the construction and coordination of policies and between levels of government, articulating with civil society, so that at least we have less impactful effects in future crises,” she concludes.

The article “Different patterns of state coordination; the explanatory factors of coordinating action in Brazilian states” can be read at: www.agendapolitica.ufscar.br/index.php/agendapolitica/article/view/900.

* With information from the CEM.