Have you felt the climate crisis yet?
Back when I planned this post a couple months ago, the news in Brazil would naturally not cease to talk about the rising price of coffee and how it would affect everyone, since we’re major producers and consumers of the magic bean. I myself don’t drink it, but a lot of people that I care about do and I guess it was the first time people were seriously talking about the effects of a climate crisis, because a part of their daily routines had become considerably more expensive in a glimpse.
Picture generated by AI with the prompt “Draw a full transparent coffee pot tilted and slowly dripping coffee onto a giant water body, like a water supply reservoir, but every drip is a dollar bill instead of a coffee droplet” using Microsoft Designer.
Sure we’ve all been hearing about numerous consequences of messing up the weather: rising oceans with disappearing islands, smaller crop yields, increase in frequency of “natural” disasters and unpredictable rain patterns1, but these consequences hadn’t hit some people so directly yet and it took many by surprise. Sadly, I have been actively worried about the climate crisis for at least 10 years 😓.
If you lived in Brazil in the early 2010s2 you cannot have missed the news about how our biggest city, São Paulo, was rapidly approaching water shortage due to the extended drought not allowing the refilling its now infamous “Cantareira” system. People would report everyday on what the current level of the reservoir would be and what measures were being taken: rationing, installing pumps to get water from shallow layers that the drainage would not normally reach, start building new reservoirs.
A big “upside” of these events is that someone demanded the companies providing the sanitation service to start implementing systems to report the level of these water bodies, as transparency would make it easier for anyone to monitor, ask questions and demand change. Though São Paulo seemed to have the most pressing crisis, it was not the only big city with a looming water shortage, so were Rio de Janeiro and my city, Belo Horizonte, which is how a decade ago I started to stare at this almost daily:
| 24/April | 25/April | 26/April | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paraopeba System | 88,0% | 88,1% | 88,2% |
| Rio Manso | 93,5% | 93,6% | 93,9% |
| Serra Azul | 79,5% | 79,5% | 79,4% |
| Vargem das Flores | 86,2% | 86,1% | 86,1% |
It is a moving three-day snapshot of the water reservoir levels that supply Belo Horizonte3 showing their recent trends in either filling up, draining down or staying stable. It is a beauty in itself given how it is both simple and effective at building my nerves, after all if it hasn’t been raining, for sure the percentages will be shrinking4 and after a few months in that situation, drought will be upon us.
Luckily we’ve had a streak of years between 2020 and 2024 which had the systems all maxed out. This helps in calming me down, because if it is raining constantly5 we can almost certainly rest assured that the old problem will be delayed for another year, but if it doesn’t, then we might be approaching a water crisis again, which is how December of 2024 looked:
Monthly level of the water reservoirs that supply water to the city of Belo Horizonte from 01/2017 to 04/2025
As I said in the beginning of the post, it took longer to rain, but it is also taking longer for the rain to cease, so we can never know how the situation will be when (and if) we actually have a dry season6. That’s my “climate crisis hyperfocus” of the past decade, which gets me back to the post opening question:
Have you felt the climate crisis yet?
And as I type it has consistently rained over the past month in Belo Horizonte, contradicting Tom Jobim’s famous song that “the waters of March close the summer”, that is, the start of the dry season. ↩︎
And maybe even abroad, since it became grim. ↩︎
Which I sourced from Copasa’s website on 04/28/2025 and converted to a native table on the blog for easier reading. ↩︎
Luckily it is not that simple, since it might have rained upstream and slowly reaching the reservoirs. ↩︎
But not too much, since it also wreaks havoc onto many parts of the city when it does. ↩︎
And if that comes, people will not cease to start recommending individual actions such as rationing or taking shorter showers, as if we were to blame and as if the individual consumption would not be a mere fraction of what is daily drawn for industries and agriculture. ↩︎