Brazil covers roughly half of the South American landmass and is home to about 60% of the Amazon basin. However, rapid deforestation is having a detrimental impact.
With 20% of the rainforest already lost to deforestation, the country has become one of the largest greenhouse gas contributors, impacting global efforts to tackle climate change. However, it’s already causing worrying local changes to weather systems.
This month, extremely heavy rains hit Brazil’s southern state, Rio Grande do Sul.
The rains saw 75 people lose their lives with another 88,000 left homeless, and the current weather crisis has put the necessity and urgency of conservation efforts on the global stage.
The human cost of torrential downpours
The recent torrential rains have hit cities across the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This includes the state’s capital, Porto Alegre, which is also one of the largest cities in the whole of Brazil.
This means the weather crisis has affected an estimated 731,000 people, from mortalities and loss of homes to property damage.
The extreme rains are likely caused by a number of combining factors. Meteorologist Marcelo Seluch noted that a heat wave in the country led to the formation of dry and hot air, which then blocked the passage of cold fronts to the north of the country.
Said Seluchi, “These cold fronts come from Argentina, they quickly arrive in the south of Brazil and are unable to advance. We have a succession of cold fronts that have become stationary and are maintaining the rain for several days in the state.”
Although weather systems can be influenced by many factors and extreme events occur naturally at times, the meteorologist did not rule out that climate change could have contributed to the causes of these rains.
The tech startups working on sustainability solutions
As the need for rapid and high-impact sustainability solutions grows in Brazil and globally, a new generation of startups has emerged to address a range of environmental-related challenges.
Credibl, a San Francisco-based venture, is one of the companies on a mission to improve global environments by helping companies improve on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. The tech startup was co-founded in 2018 by Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs Jitesh Shetty, Sushil Choudhari, Parth Patil, and Ravi Agarwal.
Credibl has a unique ESG platform that measures sustainable activity both within the company and across external systems like supply chains. The intelligent, end-to-end platform provides real-time, actionable insights that enable businesses to navigate the industry’s complexities.
It also offers features like an ESG virtual assistant, automatic peer benchmarking and variance analysis that spots manual mistakes.
Transparent ESG reports
In 2023 the Brazilian government announced it will become a legal requirement for public companies in Brazil to provide annual sustainability and climate-related disclosures by 2026.
Brazil’s Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad at the time, “This will generate a virtuous cycle of greater transparency and commitment, allowing the possibility of measuring the issue, because there needs to be a global institutional metric so that the market is global.”
As countries like Brazil adopt new measures to tackle climate change and make both public and private sectors more accountable for the impact their actions have on our shared environment, improved tools will be needed to monitor performance and make improvements.
In turn, with transparent, accurate reports to hand, companies can build trust and authenticity with investors, stakeholders and clients.
This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
