Quit fossil fuels to stem deadly floods in Brazil’s coffee heartland, say scientists | Extreme weather

Record flooding that has brought death and destruction to the heart of Brazil’s coffee industry is set to intensify if people continue burning fossil fuels, an analysis suggests.

Dozens of residents in Minas Gerais state have been buried alive in landslides or swept away by roads turned into rivers over the past month. Thousands more have been forced to evacuate their homes, while the broader, longer-term effects are likely to include rising coffee prices across the world.

The town of Juiz de Fora was among the hardest hit, experiencing its wettest February on record, with more than 750mm of precipitation, three times the amount expected for this period and 65% more than the previous record of 456mm set in 1988, according to the latest study by the World Weather Attribution group.

The international team of scientists said one of the main causes of these deaths was inequality and inadequate urban planning, which created vulnerabilities to landslides for poor communities living on steep, deforested and poorly drained slopes. Juiz de Fora is one of the 10 most at-risk cities in Brazil in terms of the proportion of residents living in such at-risk areas.

The intensity of rainfall in the city was also exceptional, calculated by experts as an event in several hundred years. Although the scientists were unable to determine a clear footprint of human-caused climate disruption in this case, they found that downpours in the region were expected to become 7% more severe if the planet reached 2.6°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, compared to the current level of around 1.3°C.

The authors of the document believe that the priority should be to eliminate greenhouse gases from the use of oil, gas and coal as quickly as possible. “We must fight to ensure that record months, like the one Juiz de Fora has just experienced, do not become the norm. The science shows us that the risk is increasing – we now need the urgent action it warrants,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London.

“It is vital that we fight to prevent every fraction of a degree of additional warming. Every year that we delay acting with the urgency required further stacks the dice in favor of more extreme weather events that will take lives and destroy livelihoods.”

They also urged authorities to build shelters, improve early warning systems and strengthen urban planning, particularly in low-income communities most at risk. “The scale of this tragedy is immense and it highlights how vulnerable our hillside communities can be as the planet continues to warm. Looking to the future, Brazilian leaders have clear implications for ensuring that people do not live in danger as such events occur,” observed Regina R Rodrigues, professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis.

The economic impact could prove the hardest to mitigate – with the consequences of inflation being felt around the world. The latest rapid analysis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, notes that Minas Gerais is a leading producer of Arabica coffee beans, the price of which has soared in recent years due to extreme weather conditions that have reduced harvests by 15 to 20 percent. It had been hoped that production could return to normal this year, but wetter-than-usual conditions over the past month are believed to have worsened the spread of diseases in arabica plantations.

British climate experts, who were not involved in the latest study, said the results showed how the effects of global warming in Brazil affect the prices shoppers pay at supermarket checkouts elsewhere in the world. Gareth Redmond-King, international program manager at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based non-profit, said the cost of ground coffee in the UK had risen by around a quarter over the past five years due to extreme weather effects on crops in Brazil (the number one supplier) and Vietnam.

“Not only do the worsening impacts of climate change threaten lives and livelihoods in Brazil, they actively add costs to the everyday prices we pay at the supermarket here at home, from fruit and vegetables to feed for the livestock we raise in the UK,” he said. “We know that net zero emissions are the only solution we have to limit these worsening threats and tackle the risks that expert after expert warns pose to our food security from climate change. »