Sonia Ferreira’s two-story house with pool and garden on the Brazilian coast was yet another victim of the advance of Atlantic Ocean waves, driven by climate change.
On a recent visit, the 80-year-old retiree looked around the pile of rubble left behind by the house she abandoned before it was destroyed in 2022 by strong waves in Atafona in the city of São João da Barra, north of Rio de Janeiro.
“I avoided coming back here because we have so many memories. It’s very sad,” she says, showing images on her cell phone of the house she built 45 years ago.
Global warming, combined with the silting of the Paraíba River, contributed to the erosion of Atafona’s coastline and caused the destruction of 500 houses, including the collapse of a four-story building on the beach.
This is one of countless coastal communities that are losing their battles to the ocean along Brazil’s 8,500 km of Atlantic coast.
Sea levels have risen 13 cm (5 inches) in the region around Atafona over the past 30 years and could rise another 16 cm by 2050, according to the United Nations report “Rough Seas in a Warming World,” released last month. .
Coastal areas like Atafona could see the ocean move inland by up to 150 meters over the next 28 years, said Eduardo Bulhões, a marine geographer at Universidade Federal Fluminense.
“The combination of climate change and global warming… with a river that no longer carries sand to the beaches of Atafona, has caused a catastrophe for its residents and there is no hope that this situation will be reversed,” he told Reuters.
Although dramatic, Atafona’s situation is not unique in Brazil.
Ponta Negra beach, one of the most popular resorts in northeastern Brazil, is also shrinking. In the last two decades, it has lost 15 meters of white sand to the sea. The local government is bringing in sand from elsewhere in an expensive effort to restore the beach.
At the mouth of the mighty Amazon River, a fragile ecosystem is threatened by loss of biodiversity as the river has lost strength in the region’s most severe drought on record, allowing salty ocean water to rush upstream.
“The salt water moves up the river further and this will change the entire biodiversity of that area,” said oceanographer Ronaldo Christofoletti, from the Federal University of São Paulo.
Last year, salt water reached almost as far as Macapá, a city 150 km (95 miles) from the mouth of the Amazon, killing freshwater fish and impacting local fishing communities.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change, has reported that sea levels are rising faster than ever, with the rate more than doubling in the last 10 years to 0. 48 cm per year, compared to 0.21 cm annually in 1993-2002.
Christofoletti said the loss of land in coastal cities and beaches is inevitable as sea levels rise, questioning why urban planning has not adapted.
“It is shocking to see houses being destroyed in Atafona. But you weren’t supposed to build houses there. You should have forest, a mangrove forest, a sandbank, ecosystems that would be naturally prepared to hold back the sea,” he said.
(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu and Sergio Queiroz; Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
This content was originally published in Costa do Brasil suffers strong erosion with the advance of the Atlantic; see photos on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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