In 2025, the city of São Paulo has faced successive cold fronts, leading to sharp drops in temperature. In some areas, thermometers recorded temperatures below 10°C. The increasing intensity of extreme weather events poses a major challenge for municipal administrations in protecting vulnerable groups.

Among the most affected is the homeless population, whose continuous exposure to rain, heatwaves, and especially intense cold worsens their living conditions.

The city’s climate issues cannot be separated from its social context. In 2025, it is estimated that over 90,000 people are living on the streets of São Paulo, according to the Brazilian Observatory of Public Policies for the Homeless Population at UFMG.

The data reveal the magnitude and severity of the phenomenon, as well as the need to improve the public administration’s response capacity to act in a coordinated and preventive manner in the face of climate emergencies affecting the homeless population, combining immediate measures with long-term strategies.

In recent decades, São Paulo has developed public policies to address climate change and its social impacts. The Climate Change Policy, created in 2009, and the PlanClima SP, established in 2021, are central initiatives in this regard.

The analysis of the Policy and the Plan highlights progress in recognizing social inequalities as a structural element of climate vulnerability in the city. However, both present significant gaps when addressing the homeless population.

Despite its general guidelines for protection and adaptation to climate emergencies, the Climate Change Policy fails to explicitly identify the homeless as target beneficiaries of its measures—an omission that may hinder their access to proposed actions.

Although PlanClima SP explicitly mentions homeless individuals as part of vulnerable groups and emphasizes the need to consider the impacts of extreme weather events in initiatives aimed at them, the reference is not accompanied by a coordinated set of actions and programs to meet their specific needs.

Where they exist, municipal programs targeting the homeless population in the context of climate emergencies still operate on a contingency basis rather than as permanent policies. This classification overlooks the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, as well as the persistence of homelessness as a structural issue, making public actions more recurrent and predictable.

One example is the Low Temperature Operation (Operação Baixas Temperaturas – OBT), an emergency and interdepartmental response implemented to prevent health damage and deaths from hypothermia among the homeless. It includes expanding shelter capacity, distributing blankets and hot meals, and increasing social outreach during colder months.

Despite its importance, a recent study identifies significant weaknesses in the program’s implementation, which reproduces structural problems in São Paulo’s social assistance network. These include poor infrastructure in shelters, insufficient available spots, lack of coordination among public agencies, and the absence of consolidated health data on the homeless population.

This last issue is not only a local challenge but a national one. In Brazil, death certificates do not include a field or code to indicate whether the deceased was homeless. The lack of this data field hinders or even prevents the production of statistics on the issue.

Barriers to systematically monitoring the health conditions of homeless individuals were also evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lack of official data made it impossible to track infections and deaths among this group.

This scenario highlights the need for municipal governments to update policies and programs aimed at protecting the homeless population in the context of climate emergencies. Governance and social oversight can serve as key tools to ensure the effectiveness of actions, promoting greater transparency, citizen participation, and accountability.

In this sense, strengthening interdepartmental coordination is essential to ensure continuous responses to climate emergencies affecting the homeless population—beyond isolated actions—promoting social protection as a permanent right, even in times of crisis.

Regarding social oversight, adopting participatory evaluation practices may offer an innovative and democratic path to improve the redesign and implementation of programs, by incorporating the perspectives of those directly affected by social exclusion and climate emergencies.

At the same time, external oversight can help increase program transparency, reinforcing the need for clear indicators, such as data on the health and mortality of homeless individuals, with accessible registration systems and accountability mechanisms. The focus should be not only on the number of actions taken but also on the quality of services provided and their real impact on the lives of this population.

By recognizing the intersection between climate and inequality, space is opened for a broader debate on addressing climate emergencies in the context of homelessness and the need for coordinated actions that integrate public policies to ensure not only emergency protection but also dignity, resilience, and climate justice for those who need it most.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the institutional positions of the organizations to which they are affiliated.

Researcher: Luís Paulo Bresciani
São Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP)

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