When the rain became omnipresent and the waters began to rise in Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, my friend had only left the hospital two weeks ago. She was recovering from a particularly difficult operation for a woman, the removal of a breast to eliminate a cancerous tumor, which is entering unknown territory. Then the waters began to rise and rise, the basement of the building flooded, the electricity went out, the water that was left outside was missing from the taps. The food reserves would run out in three days, but my friend could no longer leave the house or ask her children for help, because the building was isolated. Suddenly, my friend found herself living on an island surrounded by water on all sides in a city of 1.3 million people. Some volunteers carried her out of her third-floor apartment in her arms, with only what she was wearing. They took her to the house of one of her children, where they stayed for only two days, because the water also reached her. They fled towards the coast along roads with long traffic jams. On Sunday she said: “I am in a strange house, with strange people, in a city that I no longer recognize.”
This is a story of privilege in the worst extreme climate phenomenon that has taken place in a Brazilian capital. My friend is a middle-class woman, as are my relatives and acquaintances who are among the more than half a million evicted and more than 80,000 who have been left homeless in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The horror stories are the ones with floating bodies, emerging alongside the rats when the water goes down only to rise again. As of Monday, there were 147 dead and 127 missing.
What is happening now in southern Brazil was foreseen in 2015 in a government report that projected the impacts of the climate crisis until 2040 and planned adaptation measures. The Government of Dilma Rousseff shelved it and the following Governments, of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, did nothing. And what was predicted happened.
The horror images should serve as a warning to a humanity that seems to no longer be able to understand the warnings. It is the cinema of catastrophes becoming a reality without any plan for mitigation, prevention and adaptation in a State that overwhelmingly voted for the climate denier Jair Bolsonaro in the elections that he won and also in those that he lost. The south of Brazil was drowning and the predatory Brazilian Congress continued with almost three dozen projects that will accelerate global warming.
The majority of those affected cannot yet return to see what is left of their house or to (perhaps) find relatives who were lost in the flight, but they have to understand that the only thing that is certain is that the extreme phenomena will continue and everything can happen again. in a few months. Life is like that now.
And this is not only the case in southern Brazil and other regions of the planet that have been violently affected in recent years. In vast areas of the world, both the destruction of nature continues, at an even more accelerated rate, and the mitigation and adaptation actions to the ongoing climate collapse are null or almost null. Largely governed either by deniers or by the negligent, we are all climate losers, most of us sitting around waiting for the sky to fall on our heads.
.
.
_
