It is high tide, and the waves are getting closer to the oceanfront home where José “Nenéu” Rosa lives. He gets up from his lunch of sergeant fish, which he caught at dawn. Barefoot and shirtless, his skin tanned from 46 years under the sun, the fisherman checks the stability of a four-foot-tall rock wall surrounding his house that protects it from the turbulent Atlantic Ocean. He sighs in relief to see that his property is safe, at least for another day.
This little Brazilian town of 6,000 people, 200 miles up the coast from the famed sands of Rio’s Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, is apocalyptic: abandoned, tumbledown houses, streets that end abruptly in sand. Atafona’s combination of an advancing ocean as climate change fuels sea level rise and eroding sands is a phenomenon that frightens its residents, intrigues scientists, and fascinates tourists eager to see the destruction.
Many never recover from the trauma of losing their homes. Erica Ribeiro Nunes, 48, has been running from the sea her whole life, she says. The daughter, sister, and wife of fishermen, Nunes has recently been driven once again from her house, this time by a storm surge. Nunes and her family once caught and sold crabs, but the rising sea level killed 90 percent of the crabs’ habitat in Atafona’s mangroves.
Atafona sits at the mouth of the Paraíba do Sul River, the most important waterway in the southeastern region of Brazil, where two of Brazil’s most industrialized and populated cities—São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—are located. The drainage basin provides water for more than 15 million people in 184 municipalities.
Sandbanks and silting in the Paraíba do Sul River near the city of Campos dos Goytacazes. Sediment buildup caused by dams makes the river's flow increasingly weaker near the delta, rendering it unable to protect Atafona from ocean waves.“Rio consumes 44 cubic meters per second, but it is pumped four times more, 160 cubic meters per second. This has been killing the river since the 1960s,” says João Siqueira, secretary general of the Lower Paraíba do Sul Committee.
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