RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 24 — Brazil was hit by more than three natural disasters a day last year, surpassing an annual total of 1,000 for the first time on record, a grim statistic experts blamed on climate change yesterday.

The National Centre for Natural Disasters (Cemaden) said it had registered 1,161 disasters in 2023, mainly floods and landslides, with total tolls of at least 132 people killed, more than 9,000 injured and more than 74,000 forced from their homes.

It was the highest number of disasters in the South American country since records began in 2011.

Cemaden put the total damages at more than five billion reais (RM4.8 billion), in a tally released last week.

"Climate change has had a direct impact on the increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters,” climate scientist Francisco Eliseu Aquino of Rio Grande do Sul Federal University told AFP.

The El Nino warming phenomenon in the Atlantic Ocean only exacerbated conditions, he said.

Brazil’s extreme weather last year included a rare cyclone in the south of the country that killed more than 50 people in September, and landslides in Sao Paulo state that killed more than 60 people in February.

Other regions were meanwhile hit by historic droughts, notably the Amazon rainforest.

"The volume of rain was far bigger than normal in the south and smaller in the north and northeast,” said Cemaden director Regina Alvala in a statement.

She said climate change contributed to the extremes.

"A warmer ocean produces more vapor in the atmosphere, and more intense and concentrated rains as a result,” she said.

Last year, the hottest on record, saw numerous climate disasters worldwide, as Earth’s surface temperature nearly crossed the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring programme. — AFP