Magda Adelaide Lombardo

Socio-climatic hotspots in Brazil

Brazil suffers yearly from extreme weather and climate events, which can be exacerbated in a warmer climate. Although several studies have analyzed the projections of climate change in Brazil, little attention has been paid to defining the locations that can be most affected, and consequently have a more vulnerable population, in a spatially-explicit form. This study presents a spatial analysis of summarized climate change data and a joint investigation combining these possible climate changes and social vulnerability indicators in Brazil. The Regional Climate Change Index (RCCI), which can synthesize a large number of climate model projections, is used for the climate analysis, and the Socio-Climatic Vulnerability Index (SCVI) is proposed to aggregate local population vulnerabilities to the climate change information. The RCCI results show climatic hotspots emerging in Brazil, covering the western portion of the Northeast (NE), northwestern Minas Gerais state and center-western (CW) and northern regions (N), except northeast Pará and Amapá states. The SCVI analysis reveals major socio-climatic hotspots in the NE and several localized hotspots in some of the major Brazilian metropolitan regions, namely Manaus, Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The two novelties of this study are a spatially detailed analysis of the RCCI in Brazil and the development of an index that can summarize the large amount of climate model information available today with social vulnerability indicators. Both indices may be important tools for improving the dialogue between climate and social scientists and for communicating climate change to policymakers in a more synthetic and socially relevant form.

Data on the volumes of water stored in the reservoirs supplying the Metropolitan Area of Sao Paulo (2003–2015)

The dataset addressed in this article relates to the research article entitled “Urban water supply and the changes in the precipitation patterns in the Metropolitan Area of Sao Paulo – Brazil” (Lima et al., 2018) [1]. The dataset presents the indices of water volumes stored in the reservoirs that supply water to the Metropolitan Area of Sao Paulo (MASP). These indices were calculated based upon data provided by the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of Sao Paulo (SABESP1) as of the year 2003 (SABESP -Basic Sanitation Company of the State of Sao Paulo, 2017) [2]. These data include air temperature, evapotranspiration, total flow and daily withdrawal. However, due to issues related to information protection, SABESP only provides data on six of the eight water-producing systems that supply the MASP with water. Thus, the data available on the SABESP website each day were collected, processed and entered into this article calculation tables.