Brazil's Oil Spill Records Were Scattered. Now They Are in One Place

Until now, a Brazilian who wanted to know how much oil had been spilled along their own coast had to know which agency to ask, and then ask several more. The records existed. They were held in different places and in different forms, and no single list said how many spills there had been or how much oil they had put in the water.

OILSPILL-BR is the answer a group of Brazilian and Portuguese researchers built: one standardized online platform, made to put the country's spill history within public reach. Isana Barreto of the Federal University of Bahia and colleagues describe it, and the national picture drawn from it, in Marine Pollution Bulletin. Their aim is a practical one. They want a record that environmental managers, emergency planners and risk assessors can all work from.

It was not the work of one institution. The author list runs from two universities in Bahia to the State University of Rio de Janeiro and the University of Porto in Portugal. It also takes in the Brazilian Coastal Management Agency and the Brazilian Navy's technology center in Rio de Janeiro, which puts a coastal agency and a navy laboratory on the same paper as the academics.

The count is 234 documented spills of more than about a metric ton between 1980 and 2022. They span Brazilian coastal waters and the offshore zone the country controls. Together those events released roughly 28,080 metric tons of oil. Both numbers describe what was written down rather than what happened, and that gap is the paper's own argument for building the database in the first place.

Laid out year by year, the record bends in two directions at once, and the team read the two bends differently. Medium and large spills have declined, a fall put down to tighter regulation, better practice and international efforts to prevent pollution at sea. Small spills went the other way and rose after the 2000s, a rise that likely reflects two things happening together: Brazil's offshore oil industry grew, and reporting improved. The record cannot pull those two apart, and a coast that is spilling more often looks much the same in the data as a coast that has finally started counting properly.

Where the oil came from is the part most likely to upset an assumption. Ships were the main source of both the incidents and the volume released. Pipelines were associated with the high-volume events: fewer of them, but the biggest single releases. Offshore platforms turn up as a source of small spills that keep recurring. Which of the three looks like the country's central problem depends on whether you count events or metric tons, and in this record ships lead on both.

The spills are not spread evenly along the coast. The Southeast holds most of the records and most of the released volume, and within it São Paulo state above all. That is the stretch where offshore production, ports, oil logistics and shipping overlap, together with the institutions that monitor them. Searching for places where spills repeat, the team found two: São Sebastião and Santos, both major oil-handling and port zones. The pattern follows where the oil moves, and also where somebody is watching it move.

Each event in the database is sorted by where and when it happened, how big it was and what kind of oil was involved. The records also carry the cause, the source and the ecosystem the oil reached. The platform is online and open to anyone, which is the part a city council, a fishing community or a reporter can actually use. What Barreto and colleagues ask for in closing is that records like these be unified across the country and kept current. Assembling the first version is the easier half of that.