Vulnerability caused by the lack of sanitation in slums of the Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract

This study used a multi-criteria index to assess vulnerability due to lack of sanitation at the microscale of the territory of Complexo do Alemão slums, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, comparing different microareas and establishing which of them need priority public action and which have less sanitary risk. The index was built using the method developed by the Jones dos Santos Neves Research and Development Support Institute to score the indicators and determine the comparative aspects in the Complexo do Alemão slums, using comparative spatial analysis. This methodology made it possible to assess that within a territory considered vulnerable in terms of sanitation, there are regions that are more fragile due to basic sanitation problems, and that this data is correlated with socio-economically more unfavorable areas, making it possible to structure the assessment of this type of vulnerability. On average, the partial index of lack of access to water was 0.34, the partial index of sewage collection was 0.28 and the glocal index was 0.31, classifying the Complexo do Alemão slums in the extreme lack range. This approach corroborated the validation of the sanitation deprivation index with information on the territorial scale of communities faced with the risk caused by unequal access to the human right to sanitation.