Deadlier natural disasters – a warning from Brazil’s 2024 floods

Global warming, landscape alterations and population growth have dramatically altered the three pillars of natural disasters – hazard, vulnerability and exposure, increasing the risk of destructive and deadly natural disasters. In this perspective we breakdown how these factors played out to shape the Brazil’s 2024 floods, one of the most destructive natural hazards in recent history, resulting in over 180 deaths. This short essay explores a newly proposed evidence-based conceptual model supported by data analysis expanding the IPCC climate risk framework. It examines the extreme precipitation and the compounded climate extreme event, including its association with heatwave, atmospheric rivers from the Amazon and El Niño and assesses changes in land cover, population and the death toll of the event. We discuss how this flood event is a heads up to global decision-makers that increases in hazard, vulnerability and exposure are changing the nature of natural disasters, making these destructive events the new norm.