Rio de Janeiro Faces Perfect Storm of Climate Change
Foreign Affairs
Coastal cities need to experiment with different strategies to boost resilience.
BY ROBERT MUGGAH, JULIA SEKULA | MARCH 27, 2021, 8:00 AM
All coastal cities are vulnerable to climate change. For thousands of years, coastal living was preferred, owing to the abundance of food supplies, ease of transportation, and potential for defending against adversaries. Today, at least 10 percent of the world’s population lives in a low-lying coastal areas. But what was once an asset is increasingly a liability. The rapid expansion of coastal cities has eroded natural barriers, destroyed resources, and degraded water quality. As a result, swelling coastal communities are exposing ever-greater numbers of people to hurricanes, storms, floods, landslides, and sea level rise.
Some coastal cities are more at risk from sea level rise and other climate-related threats than others. Within the next few decades, over 570 low-lying coastal cities could face at least 0.5 meters, over 1.6 feet, of sea level rise. If this scenario comes true, it could put over 800 million people at risk and exact some $1 trillion in total economic cost....Global average temperatures are expected to increase by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 in a “business as usual” scenario. Warming in Rio de Janeiro is expected to lead to longer, more severe, more frequent, and more lethal heat waves, affecting especially the elderly and poorer populations. Rising temperatures could also lead to a 0.3 to 2.15-meter rise in sea levels by 2100, potentially inundating much of Rio de Janeiro’s surface area, including residential and commercial real estate, public parks, ports, and power grids.
There are already signs of what’s to come. The state of Rio de Janeiro has recorded hundreds of natural disasters since the early 2000s; today, researchers estimate that at least 155,000 people living in over 1,300 high risk areas are vulnerable to landslides and floods. One of the most devastating, a massive storm and series of landslides in 2011, killed over 800 people, left 30,000 homeless, and exposed tens of thousands more to water-borne disease such as leptospirosis. The World Bank estimated the costs of the tragedy at over $2 billion. Yet in the decade since the disaster, too little has been invested in rebuilding depleted infrastructure, much less climate-proofing it. In 2012, the city started building four underground reservoirs and a diversion tunnel to improve the control of mild-to-medium floods, but these are inadequate to counter the looming threats.
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https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/27/rio-de-janeiro-natural-disasters-climate-change-urban-planning-adaptation/