Record flooding that has brought death and destruction to the heart of Brazil’s coffee industry is expected to intensify if people continue burning fossil fuels, according to an analysis.
Dozens of residents in Minas Gerais state have been buried alive by landslides or swept away when 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 higher coffee prices around the world.
The city of Juiz de Fora was among the worst affected and experienced its wettest February on record, with more than 750 mm of rain, three times the amount expected for that period and 65% more than the previous record of 456 mm set in 1988, according to the latest study by the World Weather Attribution group.
The international team of scientists said the main cause of the deaths was inequality and inadequate urban planning, which created vulnerabilities due to landslides for poor communities living on steep, deforested and poorly drained slopes. Juiz de Fora is one of the 10 riskiest cities in Brazil in terms of the proportion of residents living in those dangerous areas.
The intensity of the downpour in the city was also exceptional, calculated by experts as an event that occurs every hundred years. While scientists were unable to determine a clear footprint of human-caused climate disruption in this case, they found that downpours in the area would be expected to become 7% more severe if the planet reached 2.6°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, up from the current level of around 1.3°C.
The authors of the paper said the priority should be to eliminate planet-warming gases from the use of oil, gas and coal as quickly as possible. “We must fight to ensure that unprecedented months, like the one Juiz de Fora has just endured, do not become the norm. Science shows us that the risk is increasing; we now need the urgent action it justifies,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London.
“It is vital that we fight to avoid every fraction of a degree of additional warming. Every year we delay acting with the required urgency further increases the odds of more extreme weather events that will claim lives and destroy livelihoods.”
They also urged authorities to build shelters, improve early warning systems and strengthen urban planning, particularly in the most threatened low-income communities. “The scale of this tragedy is immense and highlights how vulnerable our hillside communities can be as the planet continues to warm. Looking ahead, there are clear implications for Brazil’s leaders to ensure that people do not live in danger as we see more such events unfold,” observed Regina R Rodrigues, professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis.
The economic impact may be more difficult to alleviate: the effects of inflation are 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 skyrocketed in recent years as extreme weather has reduced harvests by 15% to 20%. It was hoped that production could return to normal this year, but wetter than usual conditions over the past month have reportedly worsened the spread of disease in Arabica plantations.
British climate experts, who were not involved in the latest study, said the results show how the effects in Brazil of global warming are affecting the prices shoppers pay at supermarket checkouts in other parts of the world. Gareth Redmond-King, head of the international program at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based charity, said the cost of ground coffee in the UK had risen by about a quarter in the past five years due to extreme weather effects on crops in Brazil (the number one supplier) and Vietnam.
“The worsening impacts of climate change not only threaten lives and livelihoods in Brazil, but are also adding costs to the everyday prices we pay in 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 growing threats and address the risks that expert after expert warns that climate change poses to our food security.”
