Project seeks to strengthen public policy for disaster risk management

The extreme weather events in the South of Brazil call for urgent coordinated action by governments and entities. The Paraíba do Sul basin is the focus for a “pilot” project conducted by a group of researchers.

By Luciana Constantino  |  Agência FAPESP – A group of researchers at the National Disaster Surveillance and Early Warning Center (CEMADEN), São Paulo State University’s Institute of Science and Technology (ICT-UNESP) and Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Brazil, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, is working on a project designed to diagnose the capacity of Brazilian municipal governments and communities to cope with environmental disasters and help co-produce mitigation strategies.

The project is entitled “Organizational capacities to cope with extreme events”, and is funded by FAPESP. It includes stages such as the involvement of scientists in several disciplines, virtual questionnaires, novel methodologies to develop people-centered early warning systems, and fieldwork.

The first stage will involve all 184 municipalities in the basin of the Paraíba do Sul River, which spans the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. Pilot projects will be implemented in small, medium and large municipalities – São Luiz do Paraitinga (São Paulo), Cataguases (Minas Gerais) and Nova Friburgo (Rio de Janeiro) respectively – representing typical conditions in the basin and elsewhere so as to permit a comprehensive and diversified analysis.

Municipal governments and local civil defense organizations will take part in the second stage (interested parties may enroll at: bit.ly/4dMSYZE).

“We’re living in times of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. We need infrastructure and strong community involvement, but we also need coordinated action by various players to reduce social, environmental and institutional vulnerability. A key component of our project therefore has to do with the implementation of public policies, involving these players in capacity building as well as action. We plan to enhance institutional and community capabilities, among other goals,” Victor Marchezini, sociologist and CEMADEN researcher responsible for COPE, told Agência FAPESP.

The state of Rio Grande do Sul suffered the worst environmental disaster in its history in May, when unprecedented rainfall caused huge floods that devastated entire cities and caused at least 172 deaths (as reported on June 2). Many communities were completely cut off, thousands lost their homes, and roads and bridges were destroyed. Porto Alegre’s international airport was under water for weeks and will have to be extensively rebuilt, as will a number of towns.

Last year, the Taquari Valley region, one of the worst-hit in May, had already seen severe flooding due to a cyclone, with many deaths, widespread damage to infrastructure and economic losses.

“We realized that the view expressed in the past that extreme weather events would occur only every 10 to 15 years no longer matches reality, and that it’s important to estimate the rise in costs due to the increasing intensity and frequency of these events, while also strengthening citizenship so that society knows how to predict the events, mitigate the damage and reduce risks,” said Lucia Calderón Pacheco, an economist and researcher in CEMADEN’s institutional capacity building program.

According to Atlas Digital de Desastres no Brasil (“Digital Disaster Atlas in Brazil”), a portal provided by the National Civil Defense, Brazil incurred losses of BRL 48.5 billion from 5,670 floods, extreme rainfall events, tornados, gale-force winds, cyclones, hailstorms and landslides between 2020 and 2024. These disasters affected 34.7 million people. In Rio Grande do Sul alone, the losses amounted to BRL 8.41 billion and affected 5.6 million inhabitants.

In practice

At the end of last year, through COPE, Pacheco published a study analyzing the socioeconomic impact of the environmental disasters that occurred in the Paraíba do Sul basin between 2003 and 2022. It concluded that at least one disaster hit 173 of the 184 municipalities concerned and that 70% occurred in towns with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

“The small municipalities suffer most because they have small budgets and lack the institutional capacity to deal with the problem,” she said.

The study showed that although 90% of the municipalities said they had a local civil defense organization, risk mapping had been conducted in 64% (mostly large and medium cities), while 48% had contingency plans and only 22% had early warning systems.

In 2022, Marchezini ran a project called Links (Elos), which involved collecting information on the structures and capabilities of municipal civil defense organizations, resulting in a series of publications. One of these is Diagnóstico de Capacidades e Necessidade Municipais em Proteção e Defesa Civil (“Diagnosis of Municipal Capacity and Needs in Protection and Civil Defense”).  The results of Links will be used to develop the methodologies for COPE, he said.

New paths

For diagnosis in COPE, the researchers are developing new methodologies that can contribute to the formulation of public policies and help meet global targets relating to climate change mitigation.

A recent publication along these lines is Evolução da capacidade institucional da RMSP em relação às mudanças climáticas (“Evolution of climate change-related institutional capacity in metropolitan São Paulo”), proposing a new methodology for the measurement of institutional capacity in municipalities and metropolitan areas to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, on limiting and adapting to human-caused climate change. The paper uses environmental and risk management data from the National Survey of Municipal Information conducted by IBGE, Brazil’s census and statistics bureau, in 2013, 2017 and 2020.

“We found that municipal capabilities had steadily deteriorated since 2013. Disaster risk management also declined continuously, worsening between 2013 and 2017, and again in 2020. Institutional capacity to implement and manage environmental policy fell between 2013 and 2017, but improved moderately in 2020. We found that the deterioration affected all functions linked to the organizational capacity to cope with climate change,” said Leonardo Rossatto Queiroz, a specialist in public policy who led the study, which was supported by FAPESP.

The researchers analyzed these functions in four dimensions: administrative support (procurement and financial management, for example); technical activities (service provision, monitoring and knowledge management); structure and culture (relating to governance and organization); and investment.

“Institutional capabilities deteriorated in every respect. When this happens, policymaking fails. Municipalities are unable to execute properly. They lose the internal structure required to provide services to the public, their organizational culture is compromised, and they are forced to make constant spending cuts,” Queiroz said. The group plans to adapt the methodology for other regions, including the Paraíba do Sul basin.

On the problem of underinvestment, civil defense accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget, for example, although its share doubled from 0.034% in 2019 to 0.062% in 2022, according to an article by Marchezini, Fernanda Dalla Libera Damacena, Renato Eliseu Costa and Luiz Felipe da Fonseca Pereira in Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas.

“Scientists are already talking about global warming of more than 2 °C above the preindustrial period, whereas the Paris Agreement specified a limit of 1.5 °C. The question is not whether more major environmental disasters like the extreme rainfall and floods in the South of Brazil will happen. They will. We must strengthen citizenship and educate the public so that people are aware of the facts and can participate in risk management. Institutional capacity building is crucial. Otherwise, all this research has no practical meaning,” Pacheco said.