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

Record floods that have brought death and destruction to the heart of Brazil’s coffee industry are expected to intensify if people continue to burn fossil fuels, analysis shows.

Dozens of residents in Minas Gerais state were buried alive by landslides or flooded as roads turned into rivers last month. Wider, longer-term impacts are likely to include rising coffee prices around the world, as thousands more people are forced to evacuate their homes.

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

The international team of scientists said the main causes of deaths were inequality and inadequate urban planning, creating vulnerability to landslides for poor communities living on steep, deforested and poorly drained hill slopes. Juiz de Fora is one of the 10 riskiest cities in Brazil in terms of the proportion of residents living in such dangerous areas.

The intensity of the downpour in the city was also extraordinary, calculated by experts to be an event seen every few hundred years. Although scientists could not identify a clear signature of human-caused climate disruption in this example, they did find that if the planet warms 2.6C above pre-industrial levels from the current 1.3C, showers in the region are expected to be 7% more intense.

The paper’s authors said the priority should be to phase out planet-warming gases from oil, gas and coal use as quickly as possible. “We must fight to ensure that record-breaking months like the one experienced by Juiz de Fora do not become the norm. The science shows us that the risk is increasing; we now need the urgent action this justifies,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London.

“It is vital that we fight to prevent even one degree of further warming. Every year we delay taking action with the urgency required pushes the dice further in favor of more extreme weather that will take lives and destroy livelihoods.”

It also called on authorities to build shelters, improve early warning systems and strengthen urban planning, especially in low-income communities most threatened. “The magnitude of this tragedy is enormous and shows how vulnerable our hillside communities can be as the planet continues to warm. As we look to the future, as we see more of these events occur, there are clear implications for Brazilian leaders to ensure that people do not live in harm’s way,” said Regina R Rodrigues, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis.

Mitigating the economic impact may be the most difficult, as 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 the leading producer of arabica coffee beans, whose price has increased in recent years as extreme weather conditions have reduced the harvest by 15-20%. It had been hoped that production could return to normal this year, but wetter-than-usual conditions last month reportedly worsened the spread of diseases in arabica fields.

British climate experts who were not involved in the latest research said the results showed how the effects of global warming in Brazil were affecting the prices shoppers pay at supermarket checkouts elsewhere in the world. Gareth Redmond-King, head of international programs at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK-based not-for-profit organisation, said the cost of ground coffee in the UK had risen by around a quarter in the last five years due to extreme weather conditions on harvests in Brazil (the No.1 supplier) and Vietnam.

“The worsening effects of climate change are not only threatening lives and livelihoods in Brazil, but are actively adding costs to the daily prices we pay in our supermarkets 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 combat the risks that experts warn climate change poses to our food security.”