Brazil is Cracking Down on Climate Migrants While Worsening the Climate Crisis

Rio de Janeiro has about 1,000 favelas - informal communities - where a majority of its poor working class population reside under constant threat of crime, gangs, narco violence, government raids, and where now, as the author puts it ‘climate refugees’ also come to survive. To be precise, they are migrants fleeing weather- shocks in other parts of the country, but now, questionable environmental policies and government response to gang violence, could increase migration while making situations in the favelas worse. Brazil has long seen internal migrations from its Northeast due to disease and El Niño-driven droughts and floods. In one instance in the 1800’s, camps were erected in an effort to dissuade rural migration into urban centers. Droughts are common in the highly under-developed Northeast, where the population is uneducated and underprepared, and the south, equally unprepared to deal with the recurring migrant influx, has caused a situation of growing populations in the unofficial ‘favela’ settlements, where basic services like running water and electricity are scarce. The 2012-2016 drought, affecting 33 million people, was the most severe in decades and forced the government to declare a state of emergency. Now experts are warning that with global warming’s impacts, along with the government’s deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, drier conditions in the Northeast, along with longer dry spells and a water crisis, is likely. (Earther/Gizmodo)