The challenge of healing the scars of an environmental tragedy

The challenge of healing the scars of an environmental tragedy – How São Sebastião, on the northern coast of São Paulo, is working to become resilient to extreme events after the rains that devastated the city in 2023. Electrician Moiseis Bispo, 38, had just renovated his house when São Sebastião was struck by torrential rains in February of last year. A community leader in Vila Sahy, Bispo had never seen anything like it. The water flooded homes, left thousands homeless, and resulted in 65 deaths, leaving scars on both residents and the environment.

“It’s a trauma that will last a lifetime. It doesn’t matter whether we stay here or leave,” says Bispo, who fears seeing history repeat itself. However, a year and eight months later, São Sebastião is slowly healing its wounds and discovering new ways to deal with extreme weather events.

This month, an important step in that process will be completed: the final sowing of the Restaura Litoral Project, an initiative that mapped 851 landslide areas to accelerate the region’s ecological recovery.

Using drones equipped with artificial intelligence, more than 1,000 kilograms of native tree seeds have already been dropped across 183 hectares of devastated land, reaching 90% of the project’s goal. The aim is to reach 200 hectares within the next two weeks.

The project is part of a broader initiative to make São Sebastião resilient to climate events, including the creation of four conservation units and environmental education efforts. “What we take from all this is the importance of caring for the environmental future,” Bispo summarizes.

The challenge of becoming resilient

Building resilience to extreme weather events, as São Sebastião is trying to do, is a challenge throughout Brazil. Over the past decade, 94% of Brazilian municipalities were affected by some type of disaster, according to a survey by the National Confederation of Municipalities (CNM). Most of these were caused by heavy rainfall or droughts.

Even so, Brazil still lags in prevention. Between 2010 and 2023, the country spent about R$15 billion on response and recovery actions but only R$7 billion on prevention, according to Talita Gantus de Oliveira, a researcher at the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).

“We respond reactively, never proactively. The usual approach when disasters strike is like seasonal policies that only take action when the rains begin,” says Oliveira, who studied urban territorial planning for disaster management and resilience in her doctoral research.

The National Policy for Civil Protection and Defense only came into existence in 2012, after the rains that killed 900 people in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro in 2011. A study by the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (Cemaden) conducted between 2021 and 2022 found that 59% of municipal civil defense units consist of only one or two people, and 72% of municipalities lack a budget for Civil Defense.

“Another issue is that most civil defense personnel are not career public servants, so after each election, new people take over with little or no knowledge of the field. They need to be trained from scratch,” says Victor Marchezini, a sociologist at Cemaden.

According to Marchezini, another problem in Brazil is the lack of coordination between municipalities, which hampers action during incidents that affect multiple areas, such as those that occurred this year in Rio Grande do Sul.

Faced with such recent events, Brazil is now encouraging the development of Municipal Risk Reduction Plans (PMRR). By 2026, the federal government aims to fund 200 PMRRs to map geological and hydrological risks in peripheral areas. This month, the first plan was finalized for the city of Paulista, in Pernambuco.

For Oliveira, while this initiative represents progress, Brazil will also need to address other challenges, such as creating continuous public policies, securing funding for municipalities, enforcing plans, investing in urban planning and quality housing, and combating real estate speculation in disaster-prone areas.

“Resilience has become a buzzword, co-opted as a tool for gentrification. But true resilience is about community mobilization,” she emphasizes.

Marchezini is coordinating a project, Cope/Fapesp (Organizational Capacities for Preparing for Extreme Events), which will map cities’ capacity to manage extreme events starting in 2025 and will conduct pilot training in select locations.

“We can’t have enough Civil Defense personnel to assist thousands of people, so we need effective public policies to engage and prepare the population,” he says.

The example of São Sebastião

Community mobilization is at the heart of São Sebastião’s environmental and social initiatives focused on resilience. The municipality benefits from being a coastal tourist destination that attracts affluent visitors, which helped raise funds and foster partnerships for the Restaura Litoral project after the tragedy.

The project is a collaborative effort involving the local NGO Instituto Conservação Costeira (ICC), the government through the Fundação Florestal, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF), and private sector entities.

Part of the funding came from Tamoios Concessionaire as compensation for the environmental impact of constructing the Nova Tamoios Highway. This allowed the hiring of Atlântica Environmental Consultancy, which diagnosed the devastated areas and developed a five-step recovery plan, and Ambipar, which adapted drone technology to disperse the seeds.

The project uses biodegradable capsules from the pharmaceutical industry and organic fertilizer derived from wastewater treatment residues.

“Given the steep and hard-to-access areas in São Sebastião, we had to modify the drones to quickly disperse both large and small seeds,” explains Gabriel Estevam, Ambipar’s corporate director.

Species such as guapuruvu, embaúba, crindiúva, and quaresmeira are being sown. “We are already seeing results, with vegetation over a meter tall in some landslide areas,” adds André Motta from Atlântica Environmental Consultancy.

Environmental education as prevention

“Disasters disproportionately affect those already living in risky areas, most of whom are low-income and Black. Many of these communities are already well-organized and know their territory,” Oliveira notes.

In the case of Restaura Litoral, the community participates in risk mapping and environmental education workshops. Schools also conduct activities to teach students and teachers how to deal with natural disaster risks.

“You can’t address post-tragedy recovery without involving the people who lived through it,” argues Fernanda Carbonelli, director of the ICC.

Since February, in partnership with Cemaden, weekly classes have been held in four schools, alongside nine workshops for local residents.

“We know it’s unrealistic to move everyone out of risky areas. There are more than 22,000 people in these areas, and many don’t even want to leave because it’s their home,” explains Carbonelli.

Through these activities, children and adolescents learn emergency response techniques, how to identify risky areas, and conservation practices. The goal is to train them as multipliers of this knowledge in their communities.

Anna Luisa Gallo, 17, didn’t live in São Sebastião during the landslides but was deeply affected after moving there this year. “It traumatized many people. My friends told me they were left without food and internet,” she says.

The aim in São Sebastião is to expand these activities to 20 more schools. Bispo believes such efforts should be replicated across the country. “Prevention and re-education are the best paths forward,” he emphasizes.

Author: Alice de Souza

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