Post-catastrophic Disaster Induced Laws for Climatic Change Adaptation: A Case Study in SE-Brazil

Abstract

Climate change has increased the frequency and magnitude of socio-environmental disasters in Brazil’s southeastern region, especially on State of Rio de Janeiro’s Mountainous Region, where a major disaster occurred in 2011. This disaster had a great international repercussion and, in response, the public power at the three levels of government (Federal, State and Municipal) reformulated legal instruments seeking greater efficiency in risk management processes. In this paper we analyse two legal instruments, enacted before and after the disaster, related to risk management at each level of government (at the municipal level for Nova Friburgo, the municipality most affected by the disaster of 2011), in order to evaluate the impact of this event in these instruments. The results indicate a great advance at the federal and municipal level in the analyzed legal instruments, making them more robust and helping the design of risk management systems that integrate different sectors of society and public power. But none of these instruments incorporated the relationship between climate change and disaster occurrence consistently. Regarding the State of Rio de Janeiro, the impact of the 2011 disaster on the analyzed legal instruments was very small, and no relevant differences were found. In this case, the relationship between disasters and climate change has been totally neglected. The next steps of the study include the analysis of other legal and management instruments, including those specifically focused on climate change, to understand whether these instruments have incorporated the issue of disaster risk management.