Was Climate Resilience on the Ballot? Climate Adaptation and Brazil’s Post-Election Political Landscape (and Elsewhere!)
Guest blog by Glauco Kimura de Freitas, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, Brasilia, Brazil
Photo credit: Scott Warren
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s reelection was pivotal in preserving the country’s international climate commitments. COP30, held in Belém last year, reinforced the country's position as an influential player in global climate negotiations. Moreover, among the leading presidential candidates in the most recent election, Lula’s platform presented the most explicit and consistent alignment with multilateral frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the UN’s five-year national climate action plans (Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs).
Yet his reelection on the global stage could create a domestic challenge in the medium term. Translating international commitments into tangible outcomes will require significant institutional progress. Brazil is organized as a federal government, with a strong executive branch balanced by strong state governments, much like India, the United States, and Australia. While climate policy remains a priority for Brazil’s federal government, it does not hold the same prominence within much of Brazil’s right-leaning political spectrum, which now commands a majority in Congress and governs several states.
Against this backdrop, Brazil has sought to keep climate adaptation at the center of international discussions. One example is the Alliance for the Implementation of National Adaptation Plans, an initiative led by the UNFCCC COP Presidency in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Germany, and Italy. Its objective is to accelerate the implementation of National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), ensuring that they evolve beyond planning documents, gather finance, and begin to guide concrete action. Coordination with future COP host countries is also intended to provide political and institutional continuity for this agenda.
Water Security as a Consensus-Building Agenda
Climate adaptation is a new, largely unfamiliar issue in most countries, and successful implementation in Brazil depends on interlocking and sometimes unclear responsibilities among federal, state, and municipal governments.
The federal government is responsible for defining policies, targets, regulatory frameworks, financing instruments, and coordination mechanisms, as well as producing strategic climate information. State governments play a central role in water resource management, civil defense, environmental licensing, and regional planning. Municipal governments, meanwhile, are on the front lines of climate impacts, overseeing land-use planning, urban drainage, emergency response, and the implementation of measures that directly affect local populations.
More than expanding political coalitions, Brazil policymakers and climate thought leaders will need to build a narrative capable of bringing together divergent perspectives around practical objectives. Few issues offer as much potential for consensus as water security. Prolonged droughts, floods, and extreme hydrological events affect citizens, businesses, farmers, and governments regardless of political orientation. A report issued two years ago with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB/BID) and the UK government (FCDO) assessed gaps, opportunities, and synergies across 14 national ministries, for instance, focusing on the linkage of water resources for health, energy, agriculture, cities, disaster planning and recovery, mining, ecosystems, and many other groups. The consensus: many of the vulnerabilities Brazil faces from climate change are hidden within and between ministries, particularly in how they make implicit choices about climate-dynamic water resources.
The numbers underscore the scale of the challenge. In 2021, the National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency’s (ANA) Atlas Águas identified 785 municipalities facing low or critical levels of water security, directly affecting approximately 50.8 million people. Meanwhile, the Adapta Cidades platform identified 528 priority municipalities for intervention based on social vulnerability, exposure to geo-hydrological risks, and projected climate impacts through 2030.
Water has long been a strategically important political issue in Brazil. Its significance extends beyond the urban and agricultural economies to encompass energy security and global competitiveness. This presents an opportunity for the country to adopt a genuinely resilience-oriented approach, balancing the inevitable trade-offs among competing water uses.
SINGREH and Hydroclimatic Coordination
An important part of the solution is already in place institutionally.
Brazil’s National Water Resources Management System (SINGREH) serves as the country’s primary platform for intergovernmental coordination in water governance. Its purpose is to prevent hydrologically connected territories from being managed under conflicting frameworks, fostering alignment among federal and state governments and water users.
Within this system, River Basin Committees play a strategic role. Often referred to as “water parliaments,” they bring together representatives from different levels of government, water users, and civil society to deliberate on priorities, investments, and territorial planning.
A new report from the Water Resilience Tracker program, implemented across six Brazilian river basins under the national coordination of the National Water Agency (ANA) and the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MMA), found that climate and water-related risks are already widely recognized. The principal challenge is not generating more information, but transforming existing knowledge into decisions, investments, and coordinated action. In other words, the central obstacle is not a lack of diagnosis but a deficit in implementation.
Diversifying Adaptation Finance
Climate adaptation also faces a significant financial bottleneck.
Recent applications of the Water Resilience Tracker in the Upper Tietê River Basin indicate that water-use charges remain the primary financing mechanism available, while alternative sources of capital and systems for measuring adaptation outcomes remain underdeveloped.
This situation reflects a structural mismatch between the characteristics of water-related assets and the way capital is mobilized and allocated. Without appropriate financial instruments, even technically robust plans are likely to face implementation challenges.
Some critics argue that adaptation investments impose excessive costs at a time of fiscal constraints. Yet the costs of inaction are already apparent. Extreme weather events are causing damage to infrastructure, disrupting supply chains, increasing operating costs, and heightening exposure to economic risks. From this perspective, adaptation spending should be understood not merely as an expense, but as a strategy for reducing future losses.
The growing importance of water resilience for the private sector further reinforces this argument. Companies across industries are already facing higher costs related to energy, water, and insurance, in addition to logistical disruptions, infrastructure damage, and occupational health risks linked to extreme climate events.
This may therefore be an opportune moment to align corporate planning, ESG strategies, and private investment with adaptation goals established at the national and state levels.
What Can We Learn from International Experiences?
The challenges confronting Brazil are far from unique. Across the world, climate impacts are increasingly shaping political debate, investment decisions, and government priorities.
In France, recent episodes of extreme heat have fueled discussions about the adequacy of school infrastructure, including the lack of air conditioning, as well as emergency preparedness, wildfire prevention, and the resilience of energy systems. Climate change is no longer viewed solely as an environmental concern; it has become an issue directly linked to the day-to-day functioning of society.
In Nepal, severe flooding has caused significant losses to hydropower infrastructure, sparking broader debates about energy security, regional development, and long-term economic prospects. A new discussion is beginning there about what resilience means when large-scale, transformational changes occur. The country has also intensified discussions about how to safeguard economic opportunities and quality of life amid growing climate risks.
In the United States’s November 2026 election, many states placed water squarely on the public agenda in the form of data centers, especially for artificial intelligence. Almost without exception, politicians promoting new and additional data centers in states such as Texas and Ohio lost decisively, while almost all of the 40 regional initiatives designed to increase regulatory oversight including moratoria of additional facilities passed. Many of these concerns focused on fears about the amount of water necessary to cool data centers and to produce the large volumes of energy they require. Cutbacks to federal disaster preparation and relief programs also triggered voter backlash in areas that had seen events exacerbated by climate change in the past two years. Resilience issues were hidden voter tallies, though their shadowy outlines can be resolved.
These examples differ in context but point to the same conclusion: climate adaptation is no longer a secondary policy agenda. It has become a prerequisite for economic stability, territorial security, and sustainable development.
Conclusion
The need to accelerate the implementation of National Adaptation Plans in the 80 countries that have produced NAPs — like Brazil and Nepal — is urgent. Their effectiveness, however, will depend less on producing new assessments and more on the capacity to translate knowledge into action, financing, and institutional coordination.
Brazil possesses the instruments, institutions, and technical capabilities needed to move this agenda forward. The challenge lies in connecting those assets to a political narrative capable of building durable consensus. In this regard, water security stands out as one of the most promising points of convergence across sectors, regions, and political orientations.
The goal is not to eliminate legitimate political differences in pursuit of artificial unanimity, but to recognize that the impacts of the climate crisis transcend partisan divides. Adaptation is, above all, an agenda of risk management, public protection, and sustainable development. The sooner Brazil can build consensus around these objectives, the greater its chances of transforming vulnerability into resilience.