Preventive Resettlement of Populations at Risk of Disaster - GFDRR

The most significant natural disasters and risks are related
to floods and mudslides, which occur in all five
regions with different frequency and intensity. Drought
tends to hit the northeast hardest, although it sometimes
occurs with reduced force in other regions (Table
4.1). Of the 490 weather events that triggered disasters
in 2008, 49 percent occurred in the northeast region
and 30 percent in the south and southeast regions.
Table 4.1. Number of Natural Disasters by Type and Region (2008)
Number of disasters by region
Type of natural disaster Central–West Northeast North Southeast South Total Percentage
Storms, floods, mudslides 54 180 44 58 75 411 84
Drought 3 53 9 4 69 14
Earthquakes 1 3 4 1
Tornadoes 4 2 6 1
Total 57 238 53 65 77 490 100
Percentage 12 49 11 13 16 100
Source: National Secretary of Civil Defense. Disasters Records of São Paulo, press archives, 2008
2.1 Floods
Although disasters caused by floods affect all regions,
they are more frequent and intense in urban areas,
where the price of land and houses forces low-income
populations to settle into risk-prone areas which are especially
threatened during heavy rains.
According to data from the 2002 National Basic Sanitation
Census, 1,340 municipalities (24 percent of all
those in the country) have risk-prone areas in the cities.
These are mostly in the south and southeast regions,
where 878 of the 1,340 cities with at-risk areas are located.
(Table 4.2).
Table 4.2. Number of Municipalities with Cities with Risk-prone Areas
Regions
North Northeast Southeast South Central–west Brazil
Total number of municipalities 449 1,787 1,666 1,159 446 5,507
Cities with at-risk areas 66 299 543 335 97 1,340
Percentage 14.7 16.7 32.6 28.9 21.7 24.3
Source: National Basic Sanitation Census (Encuesta Nacional de Saneamiento Básico, IBGE)
Other factors that raise the risk of floods are related to
the fragile urban drainage infrastructure, inappropriate
disposal of solid waste, and actions that reduce the soil’s
permeability.
For example, although 78.6 percent of municipalities
(4,327) had drainage systems in 2002, 34 percent (1,438
municipalities) had operating defects (bottlenecks)
conducive to flooding (National Basic Sanitation Census,
2002; Table 4.3).
The adverse effects of heavy rains and floods are increasingly
severe. According to official figures, in 2008 they
led to 130 deaths and US$33.5 million of material losses.
In 2009, they caused 44 deaths, 185,000 people lost their
homes, and economic losses exceeded US$1 billion.
2.2. Drought
Drought occurs in a region known as the Drought Polygon,
an area of 950,000 km 2 in nine states in Brazil’s poverty-stricken
northeast, where approximately 30 percent
of families earn less than US$200 a month (Map 4.2).
44 Preventive Resettlement of Populations at Risk of Disaster: Experiences from Latin America