In August 2013, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC) and Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) signed a development agreement for the Strengthening National Strategy on Integrated Management of Disaster Risk (GIDES). The main objective is to formulate strategies to improve alert systems and risk evaluation methods used in Brazil by incorporating them in the urban expansion policy.These strategies include technical activities such as, knowledge exchanging among technical experts from Brazil and Japan, field surveys, several meetings and scientific and technological researches. All these activities were conducted to produce technical manuals such as the Debris Flow countermeasure manual that is outlined in this paper.The present paper focuses on debris flow countermeasures as proposed in the specific manual following prevention-reconstruction strategy by reducing risks and also increasing the safety of disaster -affected areas. Furthermore, this paper presents two study cases, in Nova Friburgo and Blumenau cities, at Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina states, respectively, with the purpose of verifying and improve the proposed methodology. BRAZILIAN MANUAL FOR COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST DEBRIS FLOW Debris flow countermeasures in BrazilLarge debris flow disasters in Brazil are considerably less frequent than other mass movements events. However, part of the low rates of debris flow occurrences in Brazilian records is due to misinterpretations of observed mass movements by local authorities . Therefore , countermeasures implemented to attend such types of disasters in Brazil are quite rare. The President Bernardes Refinery case [Kanji et al ., 2008], in Cubatão, São Paulo, is one of the most reported debris flow countermeasures case in the country.This debris flow event took place on February 6,