The record floods that have brought death and destruction to the heartland of Brazil’s coffee industry are expected to intensify if people continue to burn fossil fuels, analysis has shown. Thousands more have been forced to evacuate their homes, while the wider, longer-term effects are likely to include higher prices for coffee across the world. Juiz de Fora is one of the 10 riskiest cities in Brazil in terms of the proportion of residents living in such danger zones. The intensity of the downpour in the city was also exceptional, calculated by the experts as a one-in-several-hundred-year event. “We must fight to ensure that record-shattering months, like the one Juiz de Fora just endured, don’t become the norm.

Source: The Guardian March 13, 2026 02:00 UTC