More than 12,500 extreme climate events were registered in the Amazon biome between 2013 and 2023, according to a recent study. But many more events were never recorded, as some Amazonian countries provided no or limited information, Gonzalo Ortuño López reported for Mongabay Latam.
The study aggregated available national data but found that the national governments of Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana didn’t provide any data on extreme weather events. As a result, data for the region overrepresents Brazil and to a lesser extent, Bolivia.
“How can we believe in the satellite data showing us that there is aridification, but that there are no heat waves in Venezuela or Colombia?” Liliana Dávalos, study co-author and a conservation biology professor at Stony Brook University, told López. “It isn’t credible. Either records are not being kept, or they are not being classified as disaster events within monitoring systems.”
Of the events analyzed by the study, researchers logged thousands of floods (4,233), landslides (3,089) and storms (2,607). The events are estimated to have affected more than 3 million people in a single year and caused extensive damage to public infrastructure.
For other types of climate disasters, however, the data were so poor that researchers couldn’t work with them. For example, only 105 heat waves were detected in the decade analyzed: 97% of them in Brazil and 3% in Bolivia. Roughly 95% of drought events were logged in just these two countries, while Peru reported just over 4%. Due to insufficient data, both disaster categories, droughts and heat waves, had to be discarded from the study.
Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Brazil-based Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) and study co-author, said the study identified several municipalities affected by climate events that have no official reports. Such gaps are particularly common in more remote areas where communities most vulnerable to climate disasters are often located.
Climate events don’t respect national borders, the authors highlighted, and transnational coordination on these events can help monitor impacts for local populations.
“It is essential to register data because then we can have a clear view of the problem. We will be able to compare what countries are doing to face climate events,” Alencar said.
Read the full story (in Spanish) by Gonzalo Ortuño López here.
Banner image: Neighborhood affected by floods in Arroio do Meio, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert/Brazil federal government.
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