Water resources management in Brazil
Water resources management is a key element of Brazil's strategy to promote sustainable growth and a more equitable and inclusive society.
As in many other countries, water resources management in Brazil has historically relied upon heavy investment on hydraulic infrastructure.
Different initiatives and institutions for water management were established by the Federal Government and states such as São Paulo and Ceara.
Numerous local, regional, and national initiatives, public and private bodies, and technical, scientific, and professional associations also play a role in Brazil's water resources management system.
Accounting for 18% of Brazil's territory and about 28% of its population, the Northeast region has only 5% of the country's water resources and is subject to recurrent, severe droughts, harvest failures, and food shortages.
The inflow of the Amazon to Brazil is 1.9 BCM per year, so that the total surface water resources in the country reach, on average, 8.2 BCM per year[4] Source: FAO The volume of stored groundwater in Brazil less than 1,000 m deep and with good quality for human uses is estimated at 112,000 km3, with highly variable extraction rates.
The 2000 PNSB was the latest survey of water supply for human consumption and wastewater collection and treatment conducted nationwide.
[8] The southeastern State of São Paulo, with a monitoring system considered very good, registered in its latest study high microbiological indexes indicative of pollution from domestic sewage both upstream and downstream in the Bairro da Serra River and even higher rated from two its main tributary streams.
[11] Brazil also has the largest hydroelectric power plant in operation in the world, the Itaipú Dam which was built from 1975 to 1991, in a joint development on the Paraná River.
Its 18 generating units add up to a total production capacity of 12,600 MW (megawatts) and a reliable output of 75 million MWh a year, providing 25% of the energy supply in Brazil and 78% in Paraguay (in 1995).
With this plan, Brazil's Government explicitly made biodiversity a part of the decision-making process for the use of the country's freshwater resources.
[13] Brazil has signed numerous treaties with neighboring countries, aimed at promoting sustainable use of shared water resources.
The Treaty of the Rio de la Plata entered into force in 1977 and is working as a political interconnection among the countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay).
The institutional framework consists of the following: The National Council on Water Resources (NCWR) is the highest organization in the system's hierarchy.
It aims at promoting the integration of water resources planning at the national, regional, and state levels and between user sectors.
More recently, the advent of river basin or sub-basin commissions has changed the terms of the debate over the "ideal scale" of water services provision.
[16] The creation of Users’ Commissions, such as COGERH (created in 1993) in the Lower Jaguaribe/Banabuiú, and a (short-lived) similar organization in Curú, have served the overlapping goals of public participation, decentralization, and transparency.
[17] According to Lemos and de Oliveira, such Users' Commissions have effectively mobilized "multidisciplinary" teams of experts—including sociologists, geographers, agronomists, and engineers—"not as organizers but as facilitators," for more participatory decision-making processes.
[18] The river basin committees represent a "new decision-making" arena which has begun to challenge the " =closed and technocratic" bureaucracy that Brazil inherited from its pre-democratic past.
The Tietê River —the State of São Paulo's largest river— runs 1,100 km from its eastern source in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region to the western border of the state where it joins the Paraná River, which then runs southward toward the Rio de la Plata estuary between Argentina and Uruguay.
However this committee was only formally established in November 1994, a result of a deliberate effort by the state técnicos (technical staff) to mobilize the municipal government and, especially, civil society.
Its functions include setting guidelines and approving river basin plans; proposing pricing criteria and values for bulk water pricing and a program for allocating proceeds derived from such water charges; integrating the decision-making and programs of water-related institutions working in the basin; and other responsibilities.
All in all, the Alto Tietê management system can be characterized as reasonably advanced, even though the rhythm of implementation has been much slower than the initial process of approving the water law and creating the basin committees.
[24] Hydrological variability and rapidly growing urban areas have caused new environmental problems in Brazilian cities, such as inundations in non-planned river basins.
One of the causes of flood impacts is that public funds (national, state, or municipal) have barely introduced wise proactive policies to follow up rapidly growing urban areas.
[25] Brazil's Government considers that, despite many studies, there is still much uncertainty about the consequences of climate change and its links to worsening critical events.
[8] On the other hand, the Technical Summary of the Fourth Assessment Report of the UNFCC, reflecting a consensus view, indicates a potential Amazon forest loss of between 20 and 80% as a result of climate impacts induced by a temperature increase in the basin of between 2.0 and 3.0 degrees Celsius.
Specifically, according to the Earth Simulator, temperature increases and disruption in precipitation cycles (up to a 90% reduction by the end of the century) could seriously hamper the workings of the Amazon as a forest ecosystem, reducing its capacity to retain carbon, increasing its soil temperature, and eventually forcing the Amazon through a gradual process of savannization.
The drought severely affected human population along the main channel of the Amazon River and its western and southwestern tributaries.
The World Bank is also collaborating with Brazil's Government on two projects for integrated water resources management in Rio Grande do Norte and Ceara.
