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COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY THE URIARTE LAB Department of Ecology,
Evolution & Environmental Biology |
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Ensuring
Sustainable water provision in the face of extreme precipitation events and
human land use in the WATERSHEDS Of THE Cantareira SYSTEM Collaborators Jean Paul Metzger, University of São Paulo, Brazil Leandro Reverberi-Tambosi,
University of São Paulo, Brazil One of the most urgent
challenges facing the world today is ensuring an adequate supply and quality
of water in light of burgeoning and often conflicting human and ecosystem
needs and climate variability and change. Humans influence water provision in
a number of ways. They engineer water management structures and develop
governance systems to meet diverse needs; these include water consumption,
ecosystem protection, flood control and storm water management. Human impacts
on water provision also occur through land use and land cover change in
watersheds while substantial indirect effects occur via the atmosphere and
hydrosphere. Any effort to ensure the sustainability of water provision to
humans and ecosystems within existing water management systems must take into
account the compounded effects of climate variability, particularly
precipitation, and human land use dynamics on water supply and quality. This project will quantify
the relative importance of extreme precipitation events and LUCC dynamics on the
quantity and quality of fresh water delivery to rivers and reservoirs in the watersheds
from the Cantareira
system, which provide
water to the São Paulo Greater Metropolitan Region (RMSP). With more than 20 million people, the
RMSP is often subject to extreme rainfall events and climate models
predict increased climate variability for the region. Between 1950 and 2003,
the frequency and intensity of rainfall increased in this region and regional
climate models predict an increase in the frequency of these events. In 2013-2014, regional drought
has brought the levels of reservoirs in the Cantereira
system to 14% of their capacity, a historical low, highlighting the vulnerability
of the large urban population to
climate extremes.
Fig. 1. Schematic of the Cantareira system.
Fig. 2. Water levels in
the Jaguari reservoir in March 2014 (Photo SABESP)
Fig. 3. Historically low
levels in the Branganca Paulista
Reservoir in São Paulo.
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