Presentation short abstract

The Geosmin Crisis in Rio de Janeiro’s water supply shows how precarious infrastructure and practices of evidencing and experiencing environmental crises shape urban ecologies of pollution, revealing how multispecies and planetary health politics take shape in practice and embedded in urban space.

Presentation long abstract

Cities vividly expose the political entanglements of pollution, environmental degradation, and public health in the Anthropocene. This article examines the health-threatening ecologies that emerge at the intersection of polluted rivers and precarious water and sanitation infrastructures in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focusing on the so-called Geosmin Crisis in the city’s water supply system. Geosmin (earth smell in Greek) is an organic compound produced by cyanobacteria that is not toxic itself but signals poor water quality. In the southern hemisphere summers of 2020 and 2021, elevated geosmin levels contaminated Rio de Janeiro´s drinking water, leading to a massive interruption of supply and triggering widespread diarrhea and nausea. The article traces how diverse actors´ practices of evidencing and experiencing the Geosmin Crisis turned Geosmin into a cultural object around which particular politics of human and environmental health crystallized. While communities along the polluted Guandu River—the city’s main water source—have long endured chronic water insecurity alongside declining aquatic ecologies, residents of Rio’s wealthier South Zone encountered the Geosmin Crisis as an acute disruption marked by brown, foul-smelling tap water and contentious scientific debates over water quality monitoring and health risks. By following these uneven encounters, the article argues that urban ecologies of pollution—“the diverse, partial, and improvisational ways in which pollution is known, lived with, and contested”—offer a critical lens for understanding how multispecies and planetary health politics take shape in practice and become embedded in urban space.