The water mark on Naira Santa Rita\u2019s wall told the story before she could find the words for it. High and brown, like a scar, it was the line left by the floodwater on 15 February 2022 \u2013 the night Petr\u00f3polis drowned.<\/p>\n
Within minutes, the mountain city she called home became a war zone. From her window, she watched bodies float past in the streets below. More than 230 people died that night<\/a>, in what was until then Brazil\u2019s worst climate disaster.<\/p>\n But Santa Rita\u2019s story extends far beyond that single tragedy. She is one among millions in a global crisis that remains largely invisible: climate displacement, a phenomenon that disproportionately destroys women\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n The mudslide in Petro\u0301polis in February 2022 killed 233 people, and displaced many more. Photograph: Mariana Rocha<\/p>\n The numbers are staggering. Over the past decade, climate-related disasters have displaced 250 million people globally \u2013 equivalent to 70,000 people forced from their homes every day.<\/p>\n According to the UN high commissioner for refugees <\/a>(UNHCR), more than 120 million people worldwide are now forcibly displaced. Of these, about 90 million live in countries with high or extreme exposure to climate risks, and half exist in the brutal intersection of conflict zones and severe climate threats.<\/p>\n In Latin America and the Caribbean<\/a> \u2013 the region most exposed to extreme climate events after Africa \u2013 an average of 2.4 million people a year have been displaced within their own country over the past decade. And the future looks even darker: by 2040, the number of countries facing extreme climate risks<\/a> is expected to jump from three to 65. By 2050, most refugee camps will endure twice as many days of dangerous heat<\/a> as they do today.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the intensification of climate change, a significant increase in cyclical and prolonged displacements is expected,\u201d warns S\u00edlvia Sander, protection officer at UNHCR. \u201cWomen who return to disaster-prone areas face successive displacements \u2013 being forced to move again and again \u2013 making life reconstruction difficult. Each new climate event destroys resources, increasing dependence on humanitarian aid.\u201d<\/p>\n The Petro\u0301polis mudslide was the first of three large climate-related disasters to hit Brazil in as many years. Photograph: Mariana Rocha<\/p>\n Brazil<\/a> has become a laboratory for this accelerating crisis. Three disasters in three years trace an upward curve of devastation: Petr\u00f3polis<\/a> in February 2022, which killed 233 people; Recife<\/a> three months later in May, when 130 people died; and Rio Grande do Sul <\/a>in May 2024 \u2013 the state\u2019s largest natural disaster, affecting 2.4 million people across 478 municipalities, killing 183, and causing economic losses estimated in the billions of reais.<\/p>\n That February afternoon, Santa Rita, then 24, had cancelled her two-year-old son Cain\u00e3\u2019s medical appointment. The rain was intensifying. \u201cThe city becomes chaotic when it rains,\u201d she says. The decision saved their lives \u2013 two buses full of passengers were swept away in the city centre.<\/p>\n But even inside her social housing complex in Correias, 15 minutes from Serra dos \u00d3rg\u00e3os national park<\/a>, concrete offered no protection. Within half an hour, the rain became a deluge.<\/p>\n Naira Santa Rita: \u2018You think you\u2019re safe in a building \u2013 you\u2019re not.\u2019 Photograph: Joa\u0303o Dama\u0301sio<\/p>\n \u201cYou think you\u2019re safe in a building \u2013 you\u2019re not; it\u2019s an illusion,\u201d Santa Rita recalls. \u201cI saw water coming in, not through the drain, but through the walls. You can\u2019t control water, tell it, \u2018Stop, don\u2019t come in.\u2019 You see it, and everything\u2019s already gone.\u201d<\/p>\n With her mother, a kidney patient who had recently received a transplant, and young Cain\u00e3, Santa Rita grabbed only documents, medicines and their dog before climbing to safety. The morning after revealed total destruction: the fridge on the floor, everything ruined, with that damning water mark left high on the wall.<\/p>\n What came next illustrates what experts call the \u201clayered vulnerabilities\u201d of climate displacement. As a single mother and intern with an ailing mother to care for, Santa Rita faced disaster economics in action: rents jumped from R$1,500 to R$5,000 (approximately \u00a3210 to \u00a3700) as landlords exploited the emergency.<\/p>\n Her mother\u2019s health deteriorated as Petr\u00f3polis had lost medical facilities for kidney patients. They had no choice but to leave for Juiz de Fora in the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais.<\/p>\n \u201cThe burden of domestic and care functions \u2013 looking after children, elderly relatives and people with disabilities \u2013 places women in a position of additional vulnerability during forced displacements<\/a>,\u201d Sander says.<\/p>\n \u201cThis multiple responsibility means women tend to prioritise the safety of others, which can delay their own escape and increase exposure to risks.\u201d<\/p>\n The pattern repeats with brutal consistency, says the expert. \u201cFactors such as poverty, race, informal work and single motherhood interact with the effects of climate change and create layers of interconnected vulnerability,\u201d Sander says.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the context of structural racism \u2013 the systemic discrimination embedded in institutions and society \u2013 Black, Indigenous or other historically discriminated ethnic-racial women face additional barriers to accessing support.\u201d<\/p>\n Rents more than trebled as landlords exploited the shortage of accommodation caused by the Petro\u0301polis mudslide. Photograph: Mariana Rocha<\/p>\n Santa Rita, now a sustainability specialist who founded the Climate Institute (Instituto DuClima<\/a>), has conducted a profiling of climate victims in Petr\u00f3polis. Since 1988, more than 600 people have died in extreme weather events.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you do the profiling, they\u2019re Black women, they\u2019re children. It\u2019s a very specific group. This is environmental racism,\u201d she says, using the term that describes how natural hazards disproportionately harm communities of colour and the poor.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen are the first to die when an extreme climate event happens,\u201d Santa Rita says, \u201cbecause they\u2019ll save everyone before saving themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Three months after the Petr\u00f3polis floods, 500 miles (800km) away in Recife, the pattern was repeated. On 28 May 2022, S\u00f4nia\u2019s house at the top of the Comunidade Sapo Nu hill \u2013 considered safe for decades \u2013 was engulfed by flood water. Her granddaughter, Eduarda Patr\u00edcia, sheltering below with two daughters aged seven and three, climbed to safety in the early hours. By 10am, water covered S\u00f4nia inside her home.<\/p>\n Eduarda Patr\u00edcia in the house in Recife where her grandmother lived, destroyed by flooding in 2022. Photograph: Arnaldo Sete\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cThe water was covering me inside my house,\u201d Eduarda Patr\u00edcia recounts. Family members rescued them on plastic sheets pulled by ropes. \u201cWe just thought about God in that moment to save us.\u201d<\/p>\n The aftermath revealed the state\u2019s abandonment of victims: the family received R$2,500 (approximately \u00a3350) in aid \u2013 a single payment to rebuild everything they had lost \u2013 and have never received any psychological support.<\/p>\n S\u00f4nia, who had struggled with alcohol before the flood, needed rehabilitation after the trauma. The family moved her away from the flood-prone community \u2013 another forced displacement.<\/p>\n By May 2024, when the waters came for Rio Grande do Sul, the script was grimly familiar. Lake Gua\u00edba\u2019s level in Porto Alegre reached 5.37 metres, surpassing by more than 60cm the previous record set in 1941. Bianca Ramires, 49, a teacher in the Sarandi neighbourhood, trusted her neighbours\u2019 decades of experience: this area never floods. She left with one backpack, expecting to return within days.<\/p>\n People are rescued in boats by the Brazilian military after flooding caused by heavy rain in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, in May 2024. Photograph: Nelson Almeida\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n After 40 days, the washing machine had been swept into the living room, and the water\u2019s force had scattered the furniture. \u201cMy graduation album, my diplomas, my certificates, my son\u2019s childhood photos. Everything was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the water\u2019s retreat does not end the trauma. J\u00falia Louzada, a psychologist at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s laboratory of psychoanalysis, society and politics, who worked with survivors in Brumadinho, where a dam collapse killed 272 people<\/a>, and Rio Grande do Sul, describes what she calls \u201cpsychic disorganisation\u201d \u2013 the state in which the loss of home and community shakes the foundation of identity itself.<\/p>\n \u201cTerritory is this physical place, but it\u2019s also a symbolic place, where memory is written, and where work networks, family, institutions are written,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cMany victims initially report shock, even anaesthesia. It\u2019s a psychic defence. But it\u2019s trauma inscribed in the body itself through sleep disturbances, tremors, sensory triggers. The sounds of rain take you back to that traumatic scene.\u201d<\/p>\n A flooded street in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in May 2024. Torrential rains left more than 180 people dead and many more missing. Photograph: Anselmo Cunha\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Ramires echoes this: \u201cEvery time it rains, it\u2019s panic. My relationship with Porto Alegre changed completely. I no longer have pleasure being here.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Louzada notes a paradox: women bear the greatest burden but also lead reconstruction. \u201cThey\u2019re historically linked to care work, reproductive labour \u2013 they\u2019ll continue these tasks in shelters, in displacement. But they\u2019re also the spearhead, the people at the front in processes of material and symbolic reconstruction of territory.\u201d<\/p>\n