Record floods in Brazil’s coffee heartland could worsen with climate change

The record floods that have devastated Brazil’s coffee-producing region are expected to intensify if fossil fuel emissions continue, according to a recent study.

In the past month, dozens of residents in Minas Gerais have been buried alive in landslides or swept away as roads turned into rivers. Thousands more have been forced to evacuate their homes. Juiz de Fora, one of the hardest-hit cities, experienced its wettest February on record, receiving more than 750mm of rainfall – three times the expected amount and 65% higher than the previous record of 456mm set in 1988, the World Weather Attribution group reported, the Guardian writes.

Scientists said inequality and inadequate urban planning were a primary factor in the fatalities, with poor communities living on steep, deforested, and poorly drained hills particularly vulnerable. Juiz de Fora is among Brazil’s 10 riskiest cities for residents in such danger zones.

The intensity of the rainfall was exceptional, described by experts as a “one-in-several-hundred-year event.” While they could not definitively attribute the floods to human-driven climate change, the analysis predicted that downpours in the area could become 7% more severe if global temperatures rise to 2.6°C above preindustrial levels, compared with the current increase of approximately 1.3°C.

Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London, said: “We must fight to ensure that record-shattering months, like the one Juiz de Fora just endured, don’t become the norm. The science shows us that risk is growing – we now need the urgent action that it justifies.” She added, “It is vital that we fight to prevent every fraction of a degree of additional warming. Each year that we delay acting with the urgency required loads the dice further in favour of more weather extremes that will take lives and destroy livelihoods.”

The study’s authors also recommended building shelters, improving early-warning systems, and strengthening urban planning in the most threatened low-income communities. Regina R Rodrigues, professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, said: “The scale of this tragedy is immense and it highlights just how vulnerable our hillside communities can be as the planet continues to heat. Looking to the future, there are clear implications for Brazil’s leaders to ensure people aren’t living in harm’s way as we see more of these events unfold.”

Minas Gerais is a major producer of arabica coffee, and extreme weather has already reduced harvests by 15–20% in recent years. The floods and wetter-than-usual conditions over the past month have reportedly worsened disease spread in coffee plantations, with potential effects on global coffee prices.

Gareth Redmond-King, head of international programme at the UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “Not only do worsening climate change impacts threaten lives and livelihoods in Brazil, but they are actively adding costs to the day-to-day prices we pay in the supermarket here at home, from fruit and veg to feed for livestock which we farm in the UK. We know that net zero emissions is the only solution we have to limit these worsening threats and tackle the risks which expert after expert is warning that climate change poses to our food security.”

By Sabina Mammadli