Natural Disaster Management in the Brazilian Amazon: An Analysis of the States of Acre, Amazonas and Pará

IntroductionFor many years, the Amazon region of Brazil has been considered to be territory immune from the threat of serious natural disasters.However, in recent years, extreme natural events, increasingly more recurrent and intense, have manifested both in rural and urban areas in the region.Consequently, this territory has been exposed to the impacts of several technological and natural hazards, mostly associated with droughts, floods, and fires and soil, fluvial, and coastal erosion.A disaster is associated with natural hazardous frequency, recurrence, and magnitude with regard to the exposed population and infrastructures' vulnerability.In the Brazilian Amazon, these disasters negatively impact a region whose development already presents many unresolved problems, with particular regard to the economic and environmental activities of the most vulnerable people (e.g., the poor in urban areas and subsistence farming communities).It is expected that the situation will worsen, considering the forecasted scenarios of more prevalent and more intense use of the forests and the increasing occupation of the cities, as well as the intensification of climate change in the Amazon region.In this sense, a big challenge corresponding to the response to these scenarios is to develop and implement risk management policies, strategies, and measures that can address the regional peculiarities.In Brazil, most of the natural disaster historical record, the academic researches, and the risk management strategies and measures are focused on the most densely populated and developed regions of the country -the Northeast, the South, and the Southeast.The scarce studies associated with this issue in the Amazon region are neither integrated nor systematic and are poorly disseminated within and outside of Brazil (Marcelino et al., 2006;Leal and Souza, 2011).Brown et al. (2001) describe and analyze the unique case study of governmental responses to natural disasters (drought and forest fires) in the Amazon region, in particular with the set up of a "situation room" in order to facilitate the flow of information and coordinate among government institutions on the extreme events of 2005and 2010(Lewis et al., 2011;;Marengo et al., 2011;Brown et al., 2006). www.intechopen.com Natural Disasters 2This book chapter aims to describe and analyze the particularities of risk management in the Amazon region, principally in the states of Acre, Amazon, and Pará.In this way, considering the possibility of understanding to what the natural risk management really integrates the governmental policies, this research seeks answers to the following key questions: What are the rules that drive risk management in Brazil and particularly in the Amazon region?Who is responsible for executing the projects and programs and for implementing and enforcing the laws that drive risk management in the Amazon region?What financial resources are available for risk management in the Amazon region of Brazil? Some initial considerationsConsidering the different variables that correspond to the risk management issues in the Amazon region, some initial reflections should be established in order to develop better studies and analyses. How to referenceIn order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following: Claudio F.