Resilience to drought and fragmentation of hydrosocial territories in a catchment in Ceará, Brazil

Código

XXV-SBRH0086

Autores

HELA GASMI, Leticia de freitas vieira, Eduardo Savio Passos Rodrigues Martins, Julien burte, Marcel kuper

Tema

STE06 - Contribuições da sócio-hidrologia para gestão de sistemas hídricos

Resumo

Increased water storage worldwide has recently been promoted to reinforce resilience to climate change. However, in many basins in the world storage is already over-developed, rendering further development of water storage illusory since this would have immediate repercussions on existing water uses and users. In Ceará state (Northeast Brazil), many large state-owned ?strategic? reservoirs have remained empty since the severe drought of 2012-2018. Even the end of the drought did not lead to more strategic water storage, although rural communities experienced better water availability. From this empirical starting point, we investigated how water storage infrastructure has been developed for and by rural communities in the name of water resilience, and how this has affected water flows. The progressive fragmentation of the catchment into several hydrosocial territories has jeopardised the water resilience of the communities concerned, as the state proceeded to store water in medium reservoirs in the upper catchments to ensure urban and rural water supplies. Fortifying water resilience requires more than building water infrastructure, even when the latter is done in the name of resilience. Water resilience must be articulated with water management and institutional arrangements within river catchments.