- Acre’s population experienced a flood at the start of 2024 and is now suffering from water shortages due to the severe drought.
- Authorities have installed water tanks for residents of rural communities in Rio Branco, but supplies are insufficient.
- After the extreme drought of 2023, the Amazon is preparing for a new drought, which is already showing signs that it could surpass last year’s crisis.
RIO BRANCO, Brazil – Rosineide de Lima, a resident of the Panorama community in Rio Branco, in the state of Acre, faces a daily struggle for survival amid the severe drought that has hit Acre’s capital and surrounding region. In her house, where seven people live, water is rationed daily. “My well will run dry in August,” she told Mongabay, worried about the health of her five children. “For now, I’m still managing to get some water from it to wash clothes once a week and do household chores, but for drinking I’ve started buying mineral water since my children started having health problems, such as dehydration.”
After experiencing an extreme drought in 2023, the Amazon is already feeling signs of a new drought this year. According to experts, the 2024 drought could be even worse. It has already affected 69% of the Amazon’s municipalities, an increase of 56% compared with the same period in 2023.
Panorama, located just over 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from Rio Branco’s downtown, is one of the 31 rural communities severely affected by the drought in the state. Although it lies 0.8 km (0.5 mi) from the banks of the Acre River, the community doesn’t rely on the polluted river for its water supply. The 700 families there have no running water and rely on wells, which are drying up due to the low water table.
The current drought is one of the most serious ever recorded in the state, with the Acre River reaching its lowest level in five years in July: 1.55 meters (5.1 feet).
Since June 14, river levels have remained below 2 m (6.6 ft), which led the federal government to recognize an emergency status in Rio Branco on July 24. In addition, an environmental emergency decree was issued for the 22 municipalities of Acre, with forecasts worsening in August and September. The impact of this drought, considered atypical by local authorities, goes beyond the environment, deeply affecting people’s lives.
To ease the effects of drought, the City Hall has installed 19 tanks, supplied by water tankers. However, with the wells drying up, the demand exceeds the supply, and transportation from the tanks to houses is often done manually, with buckets. “Many families use these tanks, so we need to control it because we can’t meet all the demand,” Lima said. ” I prioritize buying gallons of drinking water because water is everything, it’s life.”
Francisco Rodrigo de Oliveira, another Panorama local, is also suffering drought effects. At the end of July, he was filling a tank with water that he had collected by hand from bucket to bucket. “If there’s a water shortage in a home, there’s a shortage of everything,” he told Mongabay. “Buying doesn’t always work out, because it’s not every day that we have money, so we do what we can.”
Isandra Nascimento has lived in the community for 13 years and said she has become used to using the minimum amount of water so as not to run out at any time. Even though her mobility is limited after she lost her leg in a traffic accident, she said she has even taken clothes to a friend’s house to wash because there was no water in her tank.
“There are six of us in the house, so we have to control it because otherwise there’s no water for anything,” she told Mongabay. “My daughter often goes to her mother-in-law’s house when she gets off work, takes a shower and washes her clothes there so she can save the water we’ve managed to reserve here.”
Pensioner Ivone da Silva also shared the feeling that water has become a luxury. “My dream is to have water flowing again, not to ruin it, but so that we don’t run out, because water is everything in our lives,” she said as she showed how she washes the dishes at home and stores water, which is already less than halfway down the container she uses as a support.
Cowboy Sebastião Matos, who works on one of the community’s ranches, faces additional difficulties. Without a well on the land where he lives, he relies on irregular supplies from the government. “In winter, we get water from the rain or from a nearby well, but now with a drought like this, we depend on this occasional supply,” he told Mongabay. “Even so, it’s very complicated, because it doesn’t meet everything we need. We have to bathe, cook, drink and the livestock and crops are also suffering from this drought.”
The residents unanimously agreed that the solution to change this reality would be to restore the water reservoirs that already exist in the community, but which are contaminated by sewage. Another solution given by the community was to dig deeper wells to ensure that they don’t dry up.
Lima added that the high cost of digging a well prevented more residents from having access to water. “Our wells are shallower because a deep well requires a different structure and is very expensive.”
The neighborhood residents’ association told Mongabay that it had been in dialogue with Rio Branco City Hall to map out at least two points where deeper wells could be drilled to serve the population.
Extreme cycles
In less than a year, Acre has suffered the extremes of the region’s well-known seasonal events. During the “Amazon summer” (from July to November), which technically occurs between the Brazilian fall and winter, the biome experiences high temperatures and drought. In the “Amazon winter” (from December to June), when the rest of the country experiences summer and fall, the region experiences the highest volume of rainfall and full rivers.
In March, the Acre River in the capital recorded its second-highest flood since 1971, when rivers began to be monitored in the state. The level reached 17.89 m (58.7 ft), and the event came to be considered, proportionally, the biggest environmental disaster in the state.
Fires are another concern. This year, Acre had 740 fire outbreaks, 96% more than in 2023, according to INPE, Brazil’s space agency.
Extreme events have become increasingly common in Brazil, and according to Carolina Accorsi Montefusco, a civil engineer and technician at the Hydraulics and Sanitation Laboratory at Acre’s Federal University, who studies the impact of these events on the Acre population, a drought like this year’s drastically affects the lives of everyone in the community.
“With less precipitation, the water available to infiltrate the soil and refill it is drastically reduced,” she told Mongabay. “This leads to a drop in the water table, making wells less productive or completely dry. Prolonged drought can cause shallower wells to dry up, meaning the water table drops below the depth of the well. This requires the drilling of deeper wells, which is expensive and technically more complex,” she said, explaining why communities like Panorama are the most affected by this drought.
The researcher also said that, in order to mitigate impacts, it is critical that local authorities and the scientific community in Acre keep continuously monitoring these patterns and develop adequate planning to deal with the consequences of these climatic variations.
“One option is to build reservoirs or other measures that can be used both for flood control and for storing drinking water during periods of drought. These reservoirs help regulate the flow of rivers, reducing the risk of flooding and storing water for later use. These measures not only help protect communities from the risks of floods and droughts but also promote water resilience and long-term sustainability,” she suggested.
Irving Foster Brown, an environmental scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, also pointed out the complexity of the situation. He explained that the alternation between the El Niño and La Niña phenomena, respectively the abnormal warming and cooling of the waters of the equatorial Pacific, contributed to these extreme events, among other factors. El Niño occurred in 2023 and will be replaced by La Niña this year. “Drought is easier to predict than flood,” Brown told Mongabay. “The change in the distribution of currents in the ocean affects what happens on land, so these variations affect the climate too.”
A report by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a team of international climate scientists who analyze extreme weather events, concluded that global warming was primarily responsible for the severe drought that hit the Amazon River Basin in 2023. El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon long suspected of being one of the main causes of the drought, played a much smaller role, according to WWA.
The combination of low rainfall and high evaporation triggered what the authors classified as an exceptional “agricultural drought.” This condition has become 30 times more likely due to global warming, the report concluded.
The lowest levels ever recorded for the Acre River in the capital reflect the seriousness of the situation. The lowest level, 1.25 m (4 ft), was recorded Oct. 2, 2022. This year, with the La Niña phenomenon expected to set in from August, the drought may not reach such low levels, but the lack of rain remains worrying.
Despite rains that restored navigability and reconnected communities isolated by the historic drought in 2023, rivers throughout the biome are at lower levels now than in the same period in 2023. At the start of May, the Negro River reached 25.5 m (83.7 ft), about 1.75 m (5.74 ft) and 3.75 m (12.3 ft) lower than in the last three years. In June, the level of the Madeira River fell by 3 m (9.8 ft) in two weeks, reaching 4.1 m (13.5 ft) on the 19th, the lowest level in 2024.
Until now, Amazonian states haven’t recorded enough rainfall to indicate promising changes. In Rio Branco, it rained 1.20 millimeters (0.05 inches) by the end of June — nowhere near the 60 mm (2.36 in) expected for the period.
The coordinator of Rio Branco’s Civil Defense, Lieutenant Colonel José Glacio de Souza, said the level of 1.55 m recorded in the Acre River in July is already considered atypical for the period. “We have no rain forecast, and what strikes us is that the river reached a level of 1.55 m in July, when these levels are commonly recorded in October, as the history of the lowest levels shows,” he told Mongabay. “So we already consider it an atypical event because the forecast is that, without rain, the river will dry up more and more.”
Banner image: In July, the Acre River recorded its lowest level for the period in the past 5 years. Image courtesy of Felipe Freire.
After historic 2023 drought, Amazon communities brace for more in Brazil
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