Taps Run Dry in Water Summit City in World's Wettest Nation

(Bloomberg) -- Delegates to the World Water Forum that kicked off in Brasilia on Monday are unlikely to suffer from water shortages during their stay, unlike many of the city’s residents who’ve endured rationing for up to 2 days a week for over a year.

And the rationing isn’t restricted to the nation’s capital. Last year at least a quarter of Brazilian municipalities faced water shortages. Even in Belem, a city nestled on the greater Amazon river system, water service is frequently interrupted, due in part to poor infrastructure.

Brazil has the largest fresh water reserves in the world, including the massive underground Guarani aquifer it shares with Paraguay and Argentina. Yet a combination of droughts, population growth, and mismanagement have drained water reservoirs more frequently in recent years. In Sao Paulo in 2014 those reservoirs dwindled to little more than pools of mud. Brazil’s situation, which mirrors crises such as that in Cape Town only on a much bigger scale, is a warning to other countries that putting off water resource management means a massive bill down the line.

"The only way to definitively solve this problem is to convince the political class to finance infrastructure able to contain the advance of ever-longer droughts," Benedito Braga, the Brazilian head of the World Water Council, an international non-profit organization, told Bloomberg News.

Costly Fix

Fixing Brazil’s water woes and ensuring supply even in years of drought will cost a staggering 300 billion reais ($93 billion) over 15 years, according to the World Water Council. That’s about 37 times what Brazil spent on soccer stadiums for the World Cup in 2014. The bill includes improving waste water treatment, which currently only 45 percent of the country’s 210 million citizens enjoy, according to government data. That means that raw sewage often flows directly into rivers and lakes, in turn contaminating fresh water supplies.

In his inaugural address to the 8th World Water Forum on Monday morning, President Michel Temer said that his government was working on legislation to modernize the regulatory framework for basic sanitation.

Some infrastructure projects that had been gathering dust are coming off the drawing board under public pressure following recent rationing. Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin earlier this month inaugurated a tunnel that will link reservoirs in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, thereby allowing both sides to share water resources. A similar duct will bring additional water supplies to Brasilia from a nearby reservoir later this year.

Yet like some of the World Cup stadiums, recent large-scale water projects have brought less clear benefits. A project to divert water from the mighty San Francisco river to homes and crop fields in the country’s Northeast has been under construction for a decade and a half and overran the initial budget several times over. Now the water level has dropped due in part to environmental issues in the tributaries. To fix that problem, the government is now considering diverting water from the Tocantins River.

Ensuring access to water means not only building more canals and bigger reservoirs. It also means replanting forests to protect tributaries and changing people’s attitudes, says Samuel Barreto with The Nature Conservancy.

"There’s bad use of water everywhere and it’s easily improved," Barreto said in an interview. "For every dollar you invest in clean water, you save 4 or 5 dollars in health spending."

Changing Habits

In the capital Brasilia, with its desert-like climate during the five-month dry season, residents traditionally washed their driveways and sidewalks instead of sweeping them. But Since the last water reservoir was built in the early 1970s, the population has grown nearly six-fold to over 3 million people in the federal district surrounding the capital. Last November the reservoirs hit an historic low, with one of them at just 5 percent of capacity.

There are some signs of changing habits. The Brasilia water utility Caesb has been giving a bonus to spendthrift consumers, helping push down average consumption 12 percent last year to 130 liters per day, according to a company statement published on its website. While that’s still above the 110 liters recommended by the World Health Organization, it’s down from 190 liters in 2014. Insurance company Porto Seguro also provides discounts on its policies to customers who use recycled or rain-captured water.

Despite such developments and recovered reservoir levels in Brasilia, the rationing is still not over, and neither is the concern of the authorities debating the impact of droughts and resource management at this year’s forum.

"Water needs to be on the agenda permanently," Helder Barbalho, minister for regional integration and one of the hosts of the event, said in an interview.

To contact the reporters on this story: Rachel Gamarski in in Brasilia at rgamarski@bloomberg.net, Simone Iglesias in Brasília at spiglesias@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Vivianne Rodrigues at vrodrigues3@bloomberg.net, Raymond Colitt, Bruce Douglas

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