Comment: Brazil is in water crisis — it needs a drought plan
As the country plunged into severe water shortages in 2014 and 2015, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences upbraided state authorities for failure to take swift, bold actions and for a lack of transparency about the gravity of the situationSix years have passed and not much has changed. This time around, the country’s economy is recovering to pre-pandemic levels. Economic growth requires extra energy to power production.
Many processes that affect south-central Brazil’s water availability are not well understood. These need more research to best inform policy. They include:Deforestation, land use, biomass burning and global warming interact to determine water availability. Fresh approaches should exploit emerging knowledge and computational tools to better incorporate small-scale and fast processes, such as vegetation, land cover, clouds and aerosol feedback effects in climate models.
. More research, along with groundwater and soil-moisture monitoring, is needed to understand how Brazilian aquifers respond to pumping, as well as climate variability and change.Climate change could intensify migration from the northeast, Brazil’s driest and poorest region, to the southeast. Other movements of people could be triggered across the country as longer, more frequent and severe droughts arise.
In November, Brazil promised to end illegal deforestation and cut emissions from 2005 levels by 50% by 2030 at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, UK. However, such measures are not ambitious enough and would not bring the country in line with green policies, such as the European Green Deal and the US Green New Deal.
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