SACRE: integrated water solutions for resilient cities

Abstract

Between 2013 and 2017, periods of drought generated a water supply crisis that affected 48% of Brazilian municipalities, causing severe public health and economic problems at a national scale. Traditional solutions, based on centralized single-source water systems, have been ineffective in Brazil and developing countries. The main objective of this project is to create new hydro-economic hybrid solutions to reduce the water vulnerability of urban and rural areas, integrating into unprecedented fashion classic and innovative engineering, management, and nature-based techniques solutions (NE&MS). The development of methods for the remediation of aquifers contaminated by diffuse or multipoint sources, based on NE&MS, will foster scientific advances in the country and may generate patentable technologies. The proposal is based on groundwater flow and reactive transport model (coupled with a surface water model); concepts of water resources allocation and conjunctive surface-groundwater use; low-cost groundwater treatment solutions (reactive barriers, focusing on nitrate and emerging contaminants); Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR); and riverbank filtration systems. Such solutions will be evaluated within an original administrative arrangement for water resource management, considering economic aspects, social habits of private and public water users, and land-use policies. Such a range of solutions and institutional involvement will be tested in a pioneering fashion based on deepening the relationships between city-countryside and ground-surface water in the Bauru-Batalha watersheds, where the municipalities of Bauru, Piratininga, and Agudos (SP) are partially located. All the cutting-edge interdisciplinary scientific experience in the areas of hydrogeology, hydrology, water resource engineering, socioeconomics, and water governance, based on the development and adaptation of intersectoral NE&MS, will allow the creation of a multiple-solutions hydro-economic digital platform that will assist in the water resource management, tailored to the biophysical and socio-economic conditions in the State of São Paulo. The SACRE Project also brings another novelty, which is the involvement of the leading institutional leaders in the groundwater resource management in the country, including universities (USP, UNESP, UNICAMP, and UNIFESP), government agencies (Instituto Geológico, CETESB, IPT, SIMI) associated with the universities of Waterloo (Canada) and Hiroshima and Okayama (Japan), receiving formal support from the government of the State of São Paulo. At the end of the project, a permanent forum will be created to support groundwater management through partner government agencies. (AU)