Transport barges navigate one of the branches of the Paraná River in Argentina's Santa Fe province. The Paraná, the second longest river in South America, has been turned into a major waterway through which a large part of Paraguay's and Argentina's agricultural exports are shipped out of the region. CREDIT: Fundación Humedales

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 29 2023 (IPS)

In addition to being a majestic river – the second longest in South America after the Amazon – the Paraná River is the waterway through which a large part of the area’s primary goods are exported. Today, its economic importance has sparked an unexpected diplomatic conflict between Argentina and the countries with which it shares the basin.

Argentina’s decision to charge tolls to vessels on its stretch of the river led to a formal complaint from Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia, which argue that the river corridor agreement signed by the five countries in 1994 stipulated that no taxes or tariffs could be imposed without the approval of all parties.

The Paraguay-Paraná Waterway River Transport Agreement created an Intergovernmental Committee as the political body that would ensure its operation and maintain it as a motor for the development of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), established by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1991 and later joined by Bolivia.

Tension reached unprecedented levels with Paraguay, a landlocked country that owns a gigantic fleet of ships that carry millions of tons of soybeans and beef, the engines of its economy, to the Atlantic Ocean and often return with fuels, essential to supply a nation that produces no oil or gas.

“What is happening is very serious. Paraguay has invested three billion dollars in the last 10 years and has 2,500 transport barges, one of the largest fleets in the world,” Andrea Guadalupe, vice-president in Argentina of the Mercosur-Southeast Asia Chamber of Commerce, which groups export companies from different countries, told IPS.

“It is not wrong for Argentina to charge a toll, because it carries out dredging and beaconing works that allow large ships to pass through the Paraná. But what is wrong is that it has not consulted the other countries and has taken a unilateral decision,” she argued.

Paraguayan Pesident Santiago Peña announced that he would resort to international arbitration, saying that his country’s sovereignty was at stake, and stating: “Paraguay has no future without the free navigability of the rivers.”

Although Peña denied that it was a reprisal, Paraguay announced this September that it would keep half of the electricity from the Yacyretá power plant located on the border between the two countries, on the Paraná River, which has an installed capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Traditionally, although it is entitled to 40 percent, Paraguay has kept only 15 percent of Yacyretá’s energy and ceded the remaining 85 percent to Argentina, a country with a population of 46 million inhabitants, six times larger than Paraguay’s, which means it obviously consumes more energy.

The Rio de la Plata, seen from Buenos Aires, is at the mouth of the Paraná River and leads to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing the transportation to the export markets of a large part of the agricultural products of one of the most productive areas of South America. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Argentina says it invests between 20 million and 25 million dollars a year in dredging work on the Paraná, which in recent years has become more necessary due to a persistent drop in the water level, which has forced barges to carry less cargo and has increased the companies’ logistical costs.

“The situation is affecting the relationship between two countries that are brothers. Argentina’s attitude is not in line with the agreements, and Paraguay is a landlocked country that needs the river to connect with the world,” Héctor Cristaldo, president of the Union of Production Chambers (UGP), which groups Paraguayan agricultural business chambers, told IPS.

Cristaldo said the main impact for Paraguay is in the supply of fuels used for agriculture and livestock and also for land transportation. “Paraguay has no trains; everything moves on wheels,” he said.

The toll crisis escalated into open friction in early September, when a Paraguayan flagged barge heading north with 30 million liters of fuel was held up for several days by Argentine authorities who released it when it agreed to pay some 27,000 dollars in tolls.

The rate for vessels put into effect in January 2023 is 1.47 dollars per ton transported. It was set by the General Administration of Ports (AGP), the government agency that controls the Argentine section of the waterway.

The new toll drew a statement from the governments of Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay, which expressed “special concern because it is a restriction on the freedom of transit” and asked Argentina to collaborate “to facilitate commercial transport, favoring the development and efficiency of navigation.”

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña (L) is greeted by his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernández on Aug. 15, when he took office in Asunción. Relations between the two countries later deteriorated over navigation rights in the Paraná River basin. CREDIT: Presidency of Argentina

From Mato Grosso to the sea

The Paraná River, together with its tributary, the Paraguay River, form a waterway stretching almost 3,500 kilometers from Mato Grosso in west-central Brazil to its mouth in the Río de la Plata, which in turn flows into the Atlantic. The basin covers almost 20 percent of South America’s territory, and has an enormous biodiversity and a remarkable productive capacity.
The lower section, from the central Argentine city of Rosario to the mouth of the river, has been dredged to allow trans-oceanic vessels to pass through, carrying millions of tons of agricultural products for export each year. In total, some 100 million tons of goods are transported through the waterway every year.

The work began in 1995, when Argentina granted its section under concession to a consortium formed by the Belgian maritime infrastructure giant Jan de Nul and the Argentine Grupo Emepa, to be in charge of dredging and signaling. Thus, the river was deepened from its natural 22 feet to 34 feet from Rosario – the country’s main agro-industrial center – to the mouth.

Further north, the waterway is only 12 feet deep, which only allows the navigation of barges, with which Paraguay and Bolivia export a major part of their soybean production, which is transferred to larger ships in Rosario.

The following year, the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture authorized the cultivation of transgenic soybeans, which would lead to a major expansion of the agricultural frontier and great pressure from agribusiness to deepen the dredging of the Paraná, which crosses the most productive area of Argentina, so that larger ships could enter.

Map of the Paraguay-Parana waterway. CREDIT: Afip

Low cost transportation

“The Paraná was transformed into a waterway that began to fulfill a function analogous to the one played by the railroad until the first third of the 20th century: to facilitate the expansion of the productive frontier and to be a low-cost transit route,” wrote geographer Álvaro Álvarez, vice-director of the Geographic Research Center of the public Universidad Nacional del Centro.

Álvarez maintains that the Paraná today is “a key infrastructure in the insertion of the region as a supplier of commodities into the international economy, a process through which industrial agriculture, mega-mining and hydrocarbon exploitation have been degrading ecosystems for decades, expelling populations from territories and affecting the health of communities.”

One of the main questions about the waterway is that there are no studies of the environmental impact generated by the modification of the river and the constant traffic of large vessels.

Last year, the Argentine Association of Environmesntal Lawyers filed an injunction demanding environmental impact assessments, which is now being studied by the Supreme Court of Justice.

“The State presented a 30-year-old environmental impact study in the file. Since then there has been and there continues to be removal of thousands of tons of sediment from the riverbed, which in many areas is contaminated with agro-toxins from industrial agriculture, and it is not known how that impacts the contamination and the dynamics of the river,” Lucas Micheloud, a member of the Association, told IPS.

“It is not a matter of adapting the river to the size of the ships, but of the ships adapting to the river,” said Ariel Ocantos, a graduate in International Relations and member of the Ecologist Workshop of Rosario, one of the environmental organizations demanding greater citizen participation in the interventions carried out in the Paraná River.

“We made several requests for information to the government because we want to know if they are conducting environmental impact studies. There is very little information and we are demanding citizen participation, which is absolutely necessary,” he said.

The confluence of the waters with the distinct colors of the pollution of each one: darker waters reflect the urban sewage of the Arrudas River, while brown reflects erosion coming from the upper Velhas River, a natural effect or product of mining visible in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 7 2022 (IPS)

Acaba Mundo has fallen into oblivion, despite its apocalyptic name – which roughly translates as World’s End – and historical importance as an urban waterway. It is a typical victim of Brazil’s metropolises, which were turned into cemeteries of streams, with their flooded neighborhoods and filthy rivers.

The Acaba Mundo stream disappeared under the asphalt and concrete of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. It was the main source of water for the first inhabitants of the city founded in 1897 and the first watercourse in the city to be culverted and hidden underground.

Interventions on the riverbed began a century ago, with modifications to adjust it to the geometric layout of the streets and canalizations, and ended with it being completely covered over, except for its headwaters, in the 1970s, geographer Alessandro Borsagli, a professor and researcher who specializes in water issues, told IPS.

It became invisible, like practically all the streams that flow into the Arrudas River, the axis of the main watershed of the planned city of Belo Horizonte, whose limits were exceeded decades ago by urban sprawl and which now has 2.5 million inhabitants.

The water is still dirty when it is returned to the Onça River after passing through the Wastewater Treatment Plant in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. Much remains to be decontaminated, as well as the Velhas River that it flows into. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Forgotten

The existence of the Acaba Mundo stream has also been erased from people’s memories. But its waters still run in clogged culverts under streets and avenues, including the city’s main avenue, Afonso Pena.

The city government does not even mention it in the presentation of the America Rene Giannetti Municipal Park, a large popular space for tourism and nature conservation in the center of the city, which was originally crossed by the stream before it was diverted by canals to another sub-basin.

Only elderly residents such as Carmela Pezzuti, who lived in Belo Horizonte for a few months in 1939, when she was six years old, still remember – as she told IPS – that the park then took its name from Acaba Mundo, when the stream still existed aboveground.

Today, the so-called Dry Bridge is still there, under which the now hidden and forgotten stream used to flow.

“This reflects the history of Belo Horizonte, of increasing interventions in the watercourses and ‘hydrophobia’ in response to the stench from the streams, which were used as sewage outfalls and turned into sources of diseases,” in addition to the increasingly frequent floods, said Borsagli.

Apolo Heringer, a physician and environmentalist who has raised awareness and mobilized local residents in defense of the Velhas River and its watershed with the Manuelzão Project, a university project named after an important literary figure in the culture of the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Business vs streams

Covering up the streams and expanding the underground channels became a demand of society in general, in addition to responding to the interests of real estate businesses that have treated the watercourses as obstacles to the construction of new housing, he said.

The transportation sector, from the automotive industry to bus companies, also pushed for the conversion of riverbeds and their banks into avenues, as has been done since automobiles took over the cities.

“The urban mobility model adopted is incompatible with watercourses,” urban architect Elisa Marques, a researcher and activist on water issues, told IPS. “Avenues are built on the valley bottoms, the riverbeds are blocked and the soil becomes more impermeable. Improving public transport would reduce the space for cars and return it to the waters.”

A residential neighborhood in northern Belo Horizonte, with its distinctive dips and rises that accelerate torrents caused by rainfall, which flood the valleys. The steeper slopes of the Curral mountain range, in the south of this southern Brazilian city, aggravate water disasters. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Floods

The increasing impermeabilization of the soil, due to urban expansion and suppression of vegetation, makes the channels, no matter how much they are enlarged, unable to absorb the increased flow of torrents in the rainiest periods, usually in December and January, said Borsagli.

The topography of Belo Horizonte favors the existence of hundreds of fast-flowing streams and minor watercourses, due to the steep slopes.

The Curral mountain range, where the main tributaries of the Arrudas River rise, which cross the most urbanized part of the city, exceeds 1,400 meters above sea level, while the Arrudas is about 800 meters above sea level.

“It is not known for sure why the Acaba Mundo stream is so named, whether it is because its source is far from the center of the city like the end of the world or because of the destructive force of its torrent,” explained the geographer, author of the book “Invisible Rivers of the Mining Metropolis”.

Flooding worsened as the city grew, especially from the 1940s onwards, and interventions that replaced the streambeds with channels aggravated the problem, according to Borsagli. He explained that channelizing a stream almost always increases the flow that floods the watershed below.

Currently, the most severe flooding continues to be seen along some parts of the Arrudas River, but it has become more frequent in Belo Horizonte’s other basin, that of the Onça River (the Portuguese name for jaguar), in the northern part of the city, whose population has grown more recently and is poorer.

In general, Brazilian cities lack efficient drainage systems. The governmental National Sanitation Information System found that in 2020 only 45.3 percent of the 4107 municipalities that participated in its assessment – out of a national total of 5570 – have exclusive rainwater drainage systems. In the rest the rainwater is mixed with wastewater.

This shortfall exacerbates the recurrent water tragedies. São Paulo also suffers annual flooding in several neighborhoods. And on the outskirts of Recife, in the Northeast, torrential rains in the last days of May left at least 127 dead and 9,000 people affected.

The primacy of automobiles over public transport put pressure on the banks of urban rivers because of streets that invade the space of the water and make the soil impermeable with asphalt, aggravating the floods that recur every year in Brazil’s major cities, according to urban architect Elisa Marques. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Pollution

In addition to the failure of stormwater drainage, there is also the pollution of water resources. For decades Belo Horizonte used the streams as sewage channels, with little treatment of the drainage, spreading filth and disease.

The situation in Belo Horizonte improved with the construction of the Arrudas River Wastewater Treatment Plant (ETE) in 2001 and the Onça Wastewater Treatment Plant in 2006, but it is still insufficient, said Apolo Heringer, a physician, environmentalist and retired professor from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

Heringer, who was a political exile during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, founded the Manuelzão Project at the university in 1997, with the aim of cleaning up and revitalizing the Velhas River, the source of half the water consumed in the areas on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte and the recipient of the rivers that cross the capital, the Arrudas and the Onça.

The ETEs respond in part to the strategy advocated by the environmentalist and his project of concentrating efforts where they are most productive.

“Along 30 to 40 kilometers of the Velhas River and the final stretches of the Arrudas and Onça rivers, 80 percent of the pollution produced by 80 percent of the population of the outlying neighborhoods is concentrated, both from sewage and garbage. It is the epicenter of pollution,” Heringer told IPS.

Focusing efforts in this area, which makes up only 20 percent of the city, would practically result in the decontamination of the Velhas River basin, which extends for 800 kilometers and flows into the São Francisco, one of the largest national rivers that crosses a large part of the semiarid Northeast region.

But the goal of being able to swim, fish and boat in the Velhas River requires 100 percent wastewater treatment, and the collection and proper management of all garbage so that the liquid runoff does not go into the rivers. This means it is still a distant dream, the expert acknowledged.

The treatment of sewage by the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (Copasa) is still incomplete; the water that is returned to the rivers still contains impurities, the environmentalist lamented.

ETE Arrudas removes the main pollutants and complies with national legislation, as shown by laboratory tests. “It is possible to visually verify the difference in quality of the treated sewage in relation to the raw sewage,” Copasa replied to questions from IPS on the matter.

However, in the Onça River ETE, the water returned to the river does not appear to be clean.

Community organizing is a lynchpin in the lives of environmental defenders in Peru, as in the case of Mirtha Villanueva, pictured here with other activists from the Cajamarca region also involved in the defense of rivers and Mother Earth. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, May 30 2022 (IPS)

“Water is part of our culture, it is intrinsic to the Amazon,” said José Manuyama, a member of a river defense committee in his native Requena, a town located in the department of Loreto, the largest in Peru, covering 28 percent of the national territory.

Despite the large size of this Amazon rainforest department or province located in the northeast of the country, data from 2020 indicated that it barely exceeded one million inhabitants, including some 220,000 indigenous people, in a country with a total population of 32.7 million.

A teacher by profession and a member of the Kukama indigenous people, one of the 51 officially recognized in Peru’s Amazon rainforest region, Manuyama reminisced about his childhood near a small river in a conversation with IPS during the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, held in Lima on May 25.

“We would wait for the high water season and the floods, because that was our world. When the water comes, it’s used for bathing, for fishing, it’s a whole world adapted to water,” he said.

And he added: “We also waited for the floods to pass, which left us enormous areas of land where the forest would grow and where my mother would plant her cucumbers, her corn. Seeing the river, the transparent water, that beautiful, fertile world: that’s where I grew up.”

Today, approaching the age of 50, Manuyama is also an activist in defense of nature and rivers in the face of continuous aggressions from extractive economic activities that threaten the different forms of life in his home region.

Manuyama is a member of a collective in defense of the Nanay River that runs through the department of Loreto. It is one of the tributaries of the Amazon River that originates in the Andes highlands in southern Peru and which is considered the longest and the biggest in terms of volume in the world, running through eight South American countries.

“We started out as the Water Defense Committee in 2012 when the Nanay watershed was threatened by oil activity,” he said. “Together with other collectives and organizations we managed to block that initiative, but since 2018 there has been a second extractive industry wave, with mining that is damaging the basin and seems to be the latest brutal calamity in the Amazon.”

José Manuyama, a member of the Kukama indigenous people and a teacher committed to the protection of nature, stands in front of the Momón River, a tributary of the Nanay River, which environmental activists have been defending from extractive activities that threaten its very existence in the department of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon jungle region. CREDIT: Courtesy of José Manuyama

Their struggle was weakened during the pandemic, when the “millionaire polluting illegal mining industry” – as he describes it – remained active. Their complaints have gone unheeded by the authorities despite the harmful impacts of the pollution, such as on people’s food, which depends to a large extent on the fish they catch.

However, he is hopeful about the new national network of defenders of rivers and territories, an effort that emerged in 2019 and that on May 25 organized its second national meeting in Lima, with the participation of 60 representatives from the Amazon, Andes and Pacific coast regions of the country.

“It is important because we strengthen ourselves in a common objective of defending territories and rights, confronting the various predatory extractive waves that exist in this dominant social economic system that uses different factors in a chain to achieve its purpose. The battle is not equal, but this is how resistance works,” Manuyama said.

Like the watersheds of a river

Ricardo Jiménez, director of the non-governmental Peru Solidarity Forum, an institution that works with the network of organizations for the protection and defense of rivers, said it emerged as a response to the demand of various sectors in the face of depredation and expanding illegal mining and logging activities detrimental to water sources.

The convergence process began in 2019, he recalled, with the participation, among others, of the Amazonian Wampis and Awajún indigenous peoples, “women defenders of life and the Pachamama” of the northeastern Andes highlands department of Cajamarca, and “rondas campesinas” (rural social organizations) in various regions of the country.

Mirtha Villanueva, defender of life and Pachamama in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru, is seen here participating in one of the sessions of the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together 60 participants from different parts of the country. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The first important milestone of the initiative occurred in 2021, when they held their first national meeting, in which a National Promotional Committee of Defenders of Rivers and Territories was formed.

They approved an agenda that they sent to the then minister of culture, Gisela Ortiz, who remained in office for only four months and was unable to meet the request to form the Multisectoral Roundtable for dialogue to address issues such as environmental remediation of legal and illegal extractive activities.

The proposed roundtable also mentioned the development of criteria for the protection of the headwaters of river basins, and the protection of river defenders from the criminalization of their protests and initiatives.

At this second national meeting, the Promotional Committee updated its agenda and created synergies with the National River Protection Network, made up of non-governmental organizations.

It also joined the river action initiative of the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (Fospa), whose tenth edition will be held Jul. 28-31 in Belem do Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region, and whose national chapter met on May 27.

Three days of activity were organized in the Peruvian capital by the defenders of the rivers and their riverside communities, who on May 26 participated in a march of indigenous peoples, organized by the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest.

“There is a coming together of the social collectives at the national level and also with their peers at the Pan-Amazonian level; we have a shared path with particularities but which coincides,” Jiménez told IPS.

A group of villagers participates in the monitoring and surveillance of the Chimín river in the Condebamba valley, in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru. The river is contaminated by illegal mining activity, which harms all the communities along its banks, as it irrigates 40 percent of the crops in the area. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva

Rivers have no borders

Mirtha Villanueva is an activist who defends life and Pachamama (Mother Earth, in the Quechua indigenous language) in Cajamarca, a northeastern department of Peru, where more than a decade ago the slogan “water yes, gold no!” was coined as part of the struggles of the local population in defense of their lakes and wetlands against the Conga mining project of the U.S.-owned Yanacocha gold mine.

The project was suspended, but only temporarily, after years of social protests against the open-pit gold mine, which in 2012 caused several deaths and led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the region for several months, in one of the most critical episodes in the communities’ struggle against the impact of extractivism on their environment and their lives.

A large part of Villanueva’s 66 years has been dedicated to the defense of nature’s assets, of rivers, to guarantee decent lives for people, in a struggle that she knows is extremely unequal in the face of the economic power of the mining companies.

“We, the defenders of the rivers, have to grow in strength and I hope that at the Fospa Peru meeting we will approve a plan of action agreed with our brothers and sisters in Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil, because our rivers are also connected, they have no borders,” she told IPS during an interview at the meeting in Lima.

“We need to strengthen ourselves from the local to the international level to have an impact with our actions. We receive 60 percent of our rainfall from the Amazon forest. How can we not take care of the Amazon?” she said.

José Manuyama stands to the right of the poster during one of his presentations at the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together activists from different parts of Peru in Lima. His group analyzed power relations in the context of the risks surrounding the country’s rivers, especially those in the Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The work she carries out with the environmental committees is titanic. She recalled the image of poor rural families protesting the change in the rivers and how it has caused rashes on their children’s skin.

And when they went to the mine to complain, they were told: “When I came, your river was already like this. Why do you want to blame me? Prove it.”

“In this situation, the farmer remains silent, which is why it is important to work in the communities to promote oversight and monitoring of ecosystems and resources. We work with macroinvertebrates, beings present in the rivers that are indicators of clean or polluted waters, gradually training the population,” she explained.

This is an urgent task. She gave as an example the case of the district of Bambamarca, in Loreto, which has the highest number of mining environmental liabilities in the country: 1118. “Only one river is still alive, the Yaucán River,” Villanueva lamented.

She also mentioned the Condebamba valley, “with the second highest level of diversity in Peru,” and 40 percent of whose farmland is being irrigated by water from the Chimín river polluted by the mines.

“In Cajamarca we have 11 committees monitoring the state of the rivers, we all suffer reprisals, but we cannot stop doing what we do because people’s health and lives are at stake,” both present and future, she said.

Pollution from urban sewage is visible in the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, near its mouth, seen here from the entrance bridge in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood that suffers frequent flooding when it rains heavily in Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, May 17 2022 (IPS)

“We do everything through parties, we don’t want power, we don’t want to take over the role of the State, but we don’t just protest and complain,” said Itamar de Paula Santos, a member of the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu (Comupra), in this southeastern Brazilian city.

Ribeiro de Abreu is one of the neighborhoods most affected by recurrent flooding in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, as it is located on the right bank of the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, on the lower stretch, into which the water drains from a 212 square kilometer basin made up of numerous streams.

Cleaning up the river and preventing its waters from continuing to flood homes requires actions that also produce social benefits.

“We have so far removed 736 families who were living in high-risk situations, on the riverbank,” Santos told IPS in the same place where precarious and frequently flooded shacks gave way to the Community Riverside Park (Parque Ciliar, in Portuguese), which has a garden, soccer field, children’s playground and fruit trees.

The project, begun by local residents together with Comupra and the local government in 2015 and gradually implemented since then, aims to extend the community park 5.5 kilometers upstream through several neighborhoods by 2025.

This includes doubling the number of families resettled, cleaning up the Onça basin and its nine beaches, three islands and three waterfalls, preserving nature and developing urban agriculture, and creating areas for sports and cultural activities. All with participatory management and execution.

Itamar de Paula Santos, an activist with the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu, longs to go back to swimming and fishing in the Onça River, as he did in his childhood. But its waters, polluted by urban waste, often flood the riverside neighborhoods in the rainy season as the river flows through the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Displaced within the same neighborhood

The families removed from the flood-prone riverbank now live mostly in safe housing in the same Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, which had 16,000 inhabitants at the 2010 census, but is now estimated to be home to 20,000 people.

The Belo Horizonte city government has a rule to resettle families from risky areas in places no more than three kilometers from where they used to live, Ricardo Aroeira, director of Water Management of the Municipal Secretariat of Works and Infrastructure, told IPS.

That is the case of Dirce Santana Soares, 55, who now lives with her son, her mother and four other family members in a five-bedroom house, with a yard where she grows a variety of fruit trees and vegetables.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to us,” she said. Five years ago she lived next to the river, which flooded her shack, almost always in the wee hours of the morning, every year during the rainiest months in Belo Horizonte – December and January.

“We had bunk beds and we piled everything we wanted to save on top of them. Then we built a second floor on the house, leaving the first floor to the mud,” she told IPS. “But I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood where I had been living for 34 years.”

She was lucky. After receiving the compensation for leaving her riverside shack, an acquaintance sold her their current home, at a low price, with long-term interest-free installments.

View of a beach on the Onça River, which the movement for clean rivers wants to recuperate as a recreational area for the local population in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. At this spot, the Onça River receives the waters of the Isidoro stream. There are another eight beaches to be restored as well. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Bad luck

Soares, who is now a domestic worker, had a daycare center that started losing money in the face of the increased offer of free nursery schools by the local government, and the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years.

Itamar Santos, a 64-year-old father of three, has also lived in the neighborhood for almost four decades. Before that, he worked as a mechanical lathe operator in other cities and for three years in Carajás, the large iron ore mine in the eastern Amazon, 1,600 km north of Belo Horizonte.

In 1983, in Carajás, he lost his right leg when he fell into a 12-meter well. “It was night-time, and there was no electricity, just dark jungle,” he explained. After the first painful impact, he learned to live with his disability and regained the joy of living, with a specially adapted car.

He became an activist and among his achievements were free bus tickets for paraplegics and a gymnasium for multiple sports. “Creating conditions that enable the disabled to leave their homes is therapeutic,” he told IPS.

View of a community garden that local residents in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood cultivate on the banks of the Onça River. Some 140 families who suffered annual flooding were resettled and now live in safe housing in the same part of Belo Horizonte, a metropolis in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

But the cause that impassions him today is the river, which in January has a heavy flow due to the heavy rains that month, but dries up in September, in the dry season.

“Let the Onça drink clean water” is the slogan of a movement also promoted by Santos, to emphasize the protection and recovery of the thousands of springs that supply the river and its tributary streams.

Every year since 2008, this movement, driven by Comupra, organizes meetings for reflection and debate on the revitalization of the river in riverside venues in different neighborhoods in the basin.

The festivities are also repeated annually, or more often. Carnival brings joy to the local population on the beaches or squares along the banks of the Onça River, and giant Christmas trees are set up for the communities to come out and celebrate the holidays.

The basin, or more precisely sub-basin, of the Onça River comprises the northern half of the territory and the population of Belo Horizonte, which totals 2.5 million inhabitants. The south, which is richer, is where the Arrudas River is located.

Both emerge in the neighboring municipality to the west, Contagem, and flow east into the Das Velhas River, the main source of water for the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte. As they cross heavily populated areas, they are the main polluters of the Velhas basin.

Major floods in the provincial capital occur mainly in the Onça sub-basin. The steep topography of Belo Horizonte makes the soil more impermeable, leading to more disasters.

Maria José Zeferino, a retired teacher from neighboring schools, at the Our Lady of Mercy Park, which was built to clean up a stream from urban pollution that was spreading diarrhea and parasites among the students of three nearby schools, in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Other riverbank parks

The Belo Horizonte city government has been working on drainage plans for years and has been implementing the Program for the Environmental Recovery of the Valley and Creek Bottoms since 2001.

In April it published the Technical Instruction for the Elaboration of Drainage Studies and Projects, under the general coordination of Aroeira.

Since the end of the last century there has been a “paradigm shift,” said Aroeira. Channeling watercourses used to be the norm, but this “merely shifted the site of the floods.” Now the aim is to contain the torrents and to give new value to rivers, integrating them into the urban landscape, cleaning them up and at the same time improving the quality of life of the riverside populations, he explained.

The construction of long, narrow linear parks, which combines the clean-up of rivers or streams with environmental preservation, riverside reforestation and services for the local population, is one of the “structural” measures that can be seen in Belo Horizonte.

The participation of students and teachers from three neighboring schools stood out in the implementation in 2008 of the Nossa Senhora da Piedad Park in the Aarão Reis neighborhood, home to 8,300 inhabitants in 2010, near the lower section of the Onça River.

Cleaning up the creek that gives the park its name was the major environmental and sanitary measure.

“Sewage from the entire neighborhood contaminated the stream and caused widespread illnesses among the children, such as diarrhea, verminosis (parasites in the bronchial tubes) and nausea,” Maria José Zeferino, a retired art teacher at one of the local schools, told IPS.

The medicinal herb garden in the Primer de Mayo Ecological Park was a demand of the local population in the southern Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Creation of the park included the clean-up of a polluted stream and provides a gathering and recreational area for local residents. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The park, which belongs to the municipality, has an area of 58,000 square meters, a pond, three courts for different sports, a skateboarding area and a paved walkway for the elderly. A total of 143 families and one farm received compensation to vacate the area, leaving many fruit trees behind.

“A clean river was our dream. And the goal of the next stage is to have swimming, fishing and boating in the city’s streams,” said Zeferino.

The Primer de Mayo Ecological Park, in the neighborhood of the same name with 2,421 inhabitants according to the 2010 census, was built during the revitalization of the stream of the same name, covering 33,700 square meters along a winding terrain. The novelty is a medicinal herb garden, a demand of the local population.

“We discovered 70 springs here that feed the stream that runs into the Onça River,” said Paulo Carvalho de Freitas, an active member of the Community Commission that supports the municipal management of the park and carries out educational activities there.

“My fight for the future is to remove much of the concrete with which the park was built, which waterproofs the soil and goes against one of the objectives of the project,” which was inaugurated in 2008, said Freitas.

Yurok lawyer Amy Cordalis (L) explains the impacts of climate change on the Klamath River, such as the drop in the number of salmon, a key species in the traditions and economy of this Native American tribe in the western U.S. state of California. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
KLAMATH, California, USA , Sep 13 2018 (IPS)

Fishermen are scarce in the Klamath River delta, unlike other fishing season, because climate change has driven up water temperatures which kills off the salmon, the flagship species of this region in northern California.

The increase in temperatures favours the proliferation of lethal fish diseases and the absence of fish has devastating effects on the Yurok, the largest group of Native Americans in the state of California, who live in the Klamath River basin.

“The river level is dropping at a time when it shouldn’t. The water warms up in summer and causes diseases in the fish. This changes the rhythm of the community and has social effects,” lawyer Amy Cordalis, a member of the tribe, told IPS during a tour of the watershed.

Cordalis stressed that the community of Klamath, in Del Norte county in northwest California, depends on fishing, which is a fundamental part of their traditions, culture and diet.

The Yurok, a tribe which currently has about 6,000 members, use the river for subsistence, economic, legal, political, religious and commercial purposes.

This tribe, one of more than 560 surviving tribes in the United States, owns and manages 48,526 hectares of land, of which its reserve, established in 1855, covers less than half: 22,743 hectares.

Conserving the forest is vital to the regulation of the temperature and water cycle of the river and to moisture along the Pacific coast.

The Yurok – which means “downriver people” – recall with terror the year 2002, when the water level dropped and at least 50,000 salmon ended up dead from disease, the highest fish mortality in the United States.

The Yurok are working to conserve and restore the Klamath River basin, to which they are spiritually and economically connected. Part of the restoration involves placing logs in the river, such as these ones that have been prepared on its banks, to channel the water and retain sediment and thus recreate the habitat needed by salmon, the species that is key to the Yurok culture. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

And in 2015 no snow fell, which affects the flow of water that feeds the river and is fundamental for the fishery because in March of each year the salmon fry come down from the mountain, Cordalis said. This species needs cold water to breed.

The federal government granted the Yurok a fishing quota of 14,500 salmon for 2018, which is low and excludes commercial catch, but is much higher than the quota granted in 2017 – only 650 – due to the crisis of the river flow that significantly reduced the number of salmon.

The migration of fish downriver has also decreased in recent years due to sedimentation of the basins caused by large-scale timber extraction, road construction, loss of lake wood and loss of diversity in the habitat and fishery production potential.

As a result, the number of chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), green sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris) and Pacific lamprey (Lampetra tridentata) have dropped in the Klamath River, while Coho or silver salmon (O. kisutch) are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Klamath River in California, the natural and spiritual sustenance of the Yurok people, is facing threats due to climate change, such as reduced flow and increased temperatures, which kill salmon, a species that requires cold water for breeding. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

A reflection of this crisis, in Cordalis’ words, is the ban on commercial fishing for the third consecutive year, with only subsistence fishing allowed.

Faced with this, the Yurok have undertaken efforts for the conservation of the ecosystem and the recovery of damaged areas to encourage the arrival of the salmon.

In 2006, they began placing wood structures in the Terwer Creek watershed as dikes to channel water flow and control sediment.

“We had to convince the lumber company that owned the land, as well as the state and federal authorities. But when they saw that it worked, they didn’t raise any objections. What we are doing is geomorphology, we are planting gardens,” Rocco Fiori, the engineering geologist who is in charge of the restoration, from Fiori Geo Sciences, a consulting firm specialising in this type of work, told IPS.

Tree trunks are placed in the river bed, giving rise to the growth of new trees. They last about 15 years, as they are broken down and begin to rot as a result of contact with the moisture and wind.

But they generate more trees, giving rise to a small ecosystem. They also facilitate the emergence of vegetation on the river ford, explained Fiori, whose consulting firm is working with the Yurok on the restoration.

Salmon is basic to the diet of the Yurok people, who live in northern California. But the catch has fallen drastically due to a lower water flow in the Klamath River and the increase in water temperature. In the picture, a member of the Yurok tribe seasons fish for dinner on the riverbank. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Starting in the fall, this strip is flooded every year, which favours the abundance of organic matter for the salmon to feed on, allowing them to grow and thrive in the new habitat.

In addition, four of the six dams along the Klamath River and its six tributaries, built after 1918 to generate electricity, will be dismantled.

The objective is to restore land that was flooded by the dams and to apply measures to mitigate any damage caused by the demolition of the dams, as required by law.

The Copco 1 and 2, Iron Gate and JC Boyle dams will be demolished in January 2021, at a cost of 397 million dollars. The owner of the dams, the PacifiCorp company, will cover at least 200 million of that cost, and the rest will come from the state government.

“The removal of the dams is vital. It’s a key solution for the survival of salmon,” biologist Michael Belchik, of the Yurok Tribe Fisheries Department, who has worked with the tribe for 23 years, told IPS.

The four reservoirs hold between five million and 20 million cubic metres of sediment, and their removal will provide 600 km of suitable habitat for salmon.

It is estimated that salmon production will increase by 80 percent, with benefits for business, recreational fishing and food security for the Yurok. In addition, the dismantling of dams will mitigate the toxic blue-green algae that proliferate in the reservoirs.

Water conservation projects exemplify the mixture of ancestral knowledge and modern science.

For Cordalis, salmon is irreplaceable. “Our job is not to let (a tragedy) happen again. The tribe does what it can to defend itself from problems and draw attention to the issue. We continue to fight for water and the right decisions. Our goal is to restore the river and get the fish to come back,” the lawyer said.

The Yurok shared their achievements and the challenges they face with indigenous delegates from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mexico and Panama in the run-up to the Global Climate Action Summit, convened by the government of California to celebrate in advance the third anniversary of the Paris Agreement, reached in Paris in 2015. The meeting will take place on Sept. 13-14 in San Francisco, CA.

This article was produced with support from the Climate and Land Use Alliance .

A view of Buenos Aires from the point where the Riachuelo flows into the Rio de la Plata. To the left can be seen the famous Boca Juniors stadium. Chronicles from 200 years ago were already talking about the pollution in the river. Credit: Courtesy of FARN

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 11 2017 (IPS)

Is it possible to spend 5.2 billion dollars to clean up a river which is just 64-km-long and get practically no results? Argentina is showing that it is.

As the government admitted to the Supreme Court of Justice in late 2016, that is the amount of public funds earmarked since July 2008 for the clean-up of the 64-km Matanzas-Riachuelo river, which has been identified as one of the worst cases of industrial pollution in the world.

The river cuts across 14 municipalities as it runs from the western Buenos Aires working-class suburb of La Matanza to the picturesque neighbourhood of La Boca, where it flows into the Río de la Plata or River Plate.“It’s true that Acumar has never done a good job. But this past year was the most disastrous. So much so that the president of the body did not even appear at the hearing before the Supreme Court.” -- Andrés Nápoli

However, the situation remains practically unchanged since the mid-19th century, when chronicles of the time described the “rotten” state of the river. Today an estimated eight million people live in the river basin, facing a serious health and environmental emergency.

“The Riachuelo river is still serving the function of drainage for the economic and human activities in the city of Buenos Aires and a large part of the Greater Buenos Aires, as it has for the last 200 years,” says a more than 200 page report seen by IPS, which the Matanza Riachuelo Basin Authority (Acumar), the official body in charge of the clean-up, submitted to the Supreme Court on Nov. 30, 2016.

“It’s not just highly polluted, but it continues to be contaminated,” said the document, which added that 90,000 tons per year of heavy metals and other harmful substances are currently dumped into the river..

In the Spanish colonial era, sheep and mule meat salting factories were built along its banks, along with tanneries that processed cow leather. Dumping waste into the river became a common practice that turned it into a veritable open sewer, which continued with more modern industries like petrochemical plants and the meat-packing industry.

In the last few decades, official promises to clean up the Riachuelo have abounded. The one perhaps best remembered by Argentines was made by María Julia Alsogaray, environment minister under then President Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who announced that they would do it in just 1,000 days. An enthusiastic Menem said that when they were finished, he would swim in the Riachuelo.

In the end, the river remained a health threat, Menem decided not to swim, to protect his health, and Alsogaray ended up in prison for corruption.

It seemed that this story could begin to change in July 2008. Or that was what the Argentine environmentalist community thought, unanimously describing as “historic” the Supreme Court ruling that ordered national, provincial, and Buenos Aires authorities to clean up the Riachuelo.

The decision was based on an article added to the constitution in 1994, which guarantees all inhabitants in the country a “healthy environment” to live in.

However, the scant progress made so far was crudely exposed during a Nov. 30, 2016 hearing before the Supreme Court.

Thousands of poor families living along the Riachuelo en Buenos Aires face serious environmental and health threats. In 2008, the Supreme Court ordered the government to relocate them, but only 3,147 of the promised 17,771 housing units have been built so far. Credit: Courtesy of FARN

That day Supreme Court president Ricardo Lorenzetti, an expert in ecology designated Goodwill Ambassador for Environmental Justice last year by the Organisation of American States (OAS), did not try to hide his disgust.

During the hearing, Gabriela Seijo, director of operations in Acumar, said that, for example, so far only 3,147 of 17,771 housing units which were to be built to relocate the families most exposed to the pollution have been completed. “If we keep up this pace, we will finish in 2036,” she said.

Faced with this scenario, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Sergio Bergman tried to blame the governments of the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), who was president when Acumar was created, and his widow and successor Cristina Fernández (2007-2015), who was president when the Court issued the ruling.

“The situation that we found was terrible. Not just because the Riachuelo was degraded and polluted to the same extent as, or worse than, when the judgment was handed down, but also because the body in charge of cleaning it up, Acumar, was not in a position to comply with the court order,“ Bergman told the Court.

However, the government of President Mauricio Macri, in office since December 2015, and Bergman himself have been in the administration for over a year and have not yet made progress towards the goals set for Acumar, which has 900 employees, many of whom were hired in 2016.

It was reported that 34,759 inspections in factories have been carried out and 57 plants have been closed down, but all of them temporarily, with no significant impacts on the environment.

According to figures provided by Acumar, there are currently six million people living in the basin, at least 10 per cent of them in some 60 slums and shantytowns.

“It’s true that Acumar has never done a good job. But this past year was the most disastrous. So much so that the president of the body did not even appear at the hearing before the Supreme Court,” lawyer Andrés Nápoli, head of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), one of the five non-governmental organisations appointed by the Supreme Court to monitor compliance with the ruling, told IPS.

Indeed, Torti did not appear at the hearing in November and, a few days after the poor presentations given by other officials, he resigned.

Macri named as his replacement lawmaker Gladys González of the governing centre-right coalition Cambiemos, who has no background in environmental affairs.

Nápoli said that, after the hearing, he asked Acumar to explain how the 5.2 billion dollars were spent, adding that if the answer was not satisfactory, he would file a lawsuit demanding an investigation into possible corruption.

“They have only cleaned up the riverbanks a little and removed many of the boats that had sunk decades ago,” diplomat Raúl Estrada Oyuela, a member of the Association of La Boca, the neighbourhood where the Riachuelo runs into the Rio de la Plata, told IPS.

“But there is a lack of will to tackle the main problem, which is the pollution of the water, soil and air, because that would mean affecting the interests of the industries, which of course would have to make important investments if they were forced to switch to a clean production system,” said Estrada, who is internationally known in environmental issues and who was president of the committee which in 1997 produced the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

In Guyana the coastal belt is protected by seawall barriers that have existed since the Dutch occupation of the country, keeping the coastline as in tact as possible. Credit: Desmond Wilson/IPS

By Desmond Brown
Jun 25 2015 (IPS)

Guyana’s new president, David Granger, sits down with IPS correspondent Desmond Brown to talk about how his country is preparing for climate change – and hoping to avert the worst before it happens.

Nearly 90 per cent of Guyana’s population lives on a narrow coastline strip a half to one metre below sea level. That coastal belt is protected by seawall barriers that have existed since the Dutch occupation of the country. In recent times, however, severe storms have toppled these defences, resulting in significant flooding, a danger scientists predict may become more frequent.

The government is now spending six million dollars annually on drainage and irrigation and requires some 100 million dollars to adapt its drainage infrastructure to deal with the effects of climate change.

Mister Granger what would you say are the primary challenges for Guyana as a result of climate change?

David Granger: There are several challenges, Guyana has various, it’s not an island as you know, it’s part of the continental landmass, but we have varying ecological and geographical zones, for example on the coastline which is low and flat the climate is actually slightly different to the inland, the forested mountainous areas, rain-heavy, part of the Amazonian rain-forest, and deeper south, closer to Brazil, we have a completely different terrain landscape of savannah grassland and the savannahs have a long wet season which is now taking place and a long dry season. On the coastline we have a long dry season and a long wet season and a short dry season and a short wet season, but in the savannahs we only have one long dry season and a long wet season and sometimes in the long wet seasons there’s flooding.

President David Granger of Guyana knows how important mitigating climate change is and the need to protect his country’s shores. Credit: Desmond Wilson/IPS

So when we speak of climate change we are speaking of very complex geographical phenomena, it is not just one, although we don’t have the experience of damages of hurricanes or volcanoes or quakes, we do have very complex weather patterns, up to a month ago there was a drought and now there’s a flood, sometimes we can move from one extreme to the next. So these factors are complicated by the exploitation of some of our resources for example timber. And as you know we are part of the Amazonian rainforest and to the extent that we cut down our trees, it could lead to all sorts of environmental problems, desertification and to the extent that there’s mining that could lead to the contamination of our rivers. So these are other matters that concern us because with the changing climate it means that eventually temperatures could become higher and hotter and life as we know it less comfortable. We need the trees. The trees are the lungs of the earth so we need to be careful that we do not damage our forests, so those are some of the main challenges those are some of the main concerns.

IPS: What then would be your administration’s policy on this the issue of climate change?

DG: Well of course we have to plan a policy or we have to chart a course that protects our citizens and traditionally as far as coastal zone management is concerned we have had to build sea defenses and build proper drainage and irrigation works, otherwise our people would be flooded up. We had a terrible flood exactly 10 years ago and this is the tenth anniversary of 2005 and in many of the communities on the coast we lost billions of dollars because of the flood so we have to protect our people from that type of catastrophe. We just have to continue what we’ve been doing traditionally, building sea walls, but we also have to implement plans to prevent the excessive cutting down of all trees and of course re-forestation to plant back areas that have been mined-out in the mining areas or the trees that have been cut down in the forested areas.

IPS: What kind of strategies and action plans would you say are needed to deal with the effects of climate change in Guyana?

DG: First of all it’s coastal-zone management, as you know much of the coastline of Guyana is below the level of the ocean at tide watermark, and as the oceans rise there is evidence that the entire coastal zone is under threat, as you drive along the coast you’d see that the Dutch had to establish concrete walls, sea walls and from time to time those walls are damaged by the fierce tides, the waves of the Atlantic they come crumbling the skids so that’s very expensive to maintain and that’s the ever-present threat, sea-level rising towards sea defenses, accompanying that of course is drainage when the water comes on the land it has to be removed, the most efficient way of removing it is with mechanical drainage, using pumps and that too is a great challenge because it’s a very expensive job and then the accessories for the surplus water on the land we have to use mechanical means to remove it. Apart from that Guyana has always been susceptible to variations in climate.

IPS: On the issue of funding most countries in the region say they don’t have the funds necessary to adapt to climate change, what’s the situation for Guyana?

DG: Well we’ve been a beneficiary of some grants from Norway and we are aware of this problem, it is not a new problem as I said it’s something that has existed from time immemorial. We’ve always had the cycle of droughts and floods just like other countries in the Caribbean and have to prepare for hurricanes, we just have to prepare for climate change, so I don’t regard this as something we should be alarmed about. The big expenditure will come if we ever have to move from the coastline and go for the inland which is higher, most of the inland territory maybe 50km from here so most of the territory is higher and the sort of doomsday scenario is that you may have to abandon some part of the coastline and that would be a tremendous cost, that would be something that we don’t want to contemplate. But you can never tell when a catastrophe could strike but I would say that as part of our policy which we’ve already announced that profits and revenues from extractive industries, gold, timber, diamonds, bauxite would be used in something called the “Sovereign Wealth Fund” so that our children don’t have face the ravages of poverty. What I’m saying is something that we have to include in our calculations in our budgets but I mention the Sovereign Wealth Fund and I mention we must start putting aside money in order to prepare for any form of catastrophe, we can’t depend on handouts all the time, but yes if we had to move it would be a tremendous cost. If we had a flood it will be at a tremendous cost and even drought is a tremendous cost.

(End)

Feast or famine: Just three years ago, flooding in Trinidad's capital of Port of Spain left residents little choice but to wade through the deluge. But lately drought has become a problem in the dry season. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Jun 23 2015 (IPS)

Starting in 1999, the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) of Trinidad and Tobago began a 10-year effort to map the country’s water quality. They started to notice a worrying trend.

The watersheds in the western region of Trinidad had progressed from being of moderate quality in some places to being outright bad. By 2010, a survey of the country showed more than 20 per cent of the watersheds were in serious trouble.“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.” -- Dr. Natalie Boodram

“We have raised the alarm bell,” said senior hydrologist David Samm. ”WASA is concerned.”

WASA received a lot of bad press during the recently concluded dry season. Residents whose communities were roiled with protests almost weekly over lack of access to potable water vehemently criticised the agency while waving placards and publicly burning tyres.

WASA is the designated body responsible for all of Trinidad and Tobago’s water sources and supply.

But factors beyond its control, like climate change and climate variability, are significant contributors to the crisis.

“During the dry season we would have longer droughts so we will not have as much water for groundwater recharge,” explained Samm, adding, “there is more intense rainfall for a given time period and because of continued development we have more flooding problems during the rainy season.”

That has resulted in more surface runoff “and that water is being flushed through the watercourses and out to sea. Therefore, we have less recharge of our groundwater systems,” he explained.

He told IPS that 60 per cent of Trinidad and Tobago’s potable water comes from surface water sources.

There has also been major housing construction along the east-west corridor of Trinidad, he pointed out. “With climate change and the increase in impervious cover (due to urbanisation) the recharge of our groundwater system will be reduced,” Samm said. As well, “with urban growth, you see garbage in the rivers – refrigerators.”

The authority decided it needed to act to protect the health of the watersheds on which its water supply depends. It introduced the Adopt-A-River programme in the summer of 2013. Since its rollout, several of the country’s rivers have been adopted, including six of the most important, and there are 175 citizens working with the Adopt-A-River programme.

Though river adoption programmes are known in several states in the U.S., the programme in Trinidad and Tobago is among the first for the Caribbean.

WASA’s decision to focus on preserving ecosystems was a forward-looking approach to the issue of sustainably ensuring access to potable water for all, as evident from observations made in the Executive Summary of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2015. Commenting on the water situation worldwide the report states the following:

“Most economic models do not value the essential services provided by freshwater ecosystems, often leading to unsustainable use of water resources and ecosystem degradation. Pollution from untreated residential and industrial wastewater and agricultural run-off also weakens the capacity of ecosystems to provide water-related services.

“Ecosystems across the world, particularly wetlands, are in decline. Ecosystem services remain under-valued, under-recognized and under-utilized within most current economic and resource management approaches. A more holistic focus on ecosystems for water and development that maintains a beneficial mix between built and natural infrastructure can ensure that benefits are maximized.”

In keeping with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals’ focus on reducing poverty and environmental degradation by helping communities to help themselves, the UNDP provided funds for one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Adopt-A-River participants

Through its Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (SGP), the UNDP provides funds and technical support to civil society organisations working on “projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people’s well-being and livelihoods at the community level.”

The Social Justice Foundation, which works in underdeveloped areas of Central and South Trinidad, received funding of just under 50,000 dollars from the SGP, which it matched with 65,000 dollars of its own money to sponsor an Adopt-A-River programme involving at-risk and disadvantaged youths in the communities of Siparia and Carlsen Field.

The programme ran for nine months from September 2014 to June 2015, during which time young people have been trained as eco-leaders and taught skills in water testing to monitor the health of the rivers in their communities, using La Motte test kits, as well as video production to record the work done.

They learned how to test for temperature, pH, alkalinity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, phosphate and nitrate and to record the changes in these parameters over the nine months of the project.

Mark Rampersad, administrative manager at the Social Justice Foundation, told IPS that WASA’s Adopt-a-River unit “further refined the project’s scope and depth as well as facilitating the various seminars and workshops, which featured environmental awareness.”

The Caparo River in Central Trinidad and Coora River in South Trinidad were the two rivers adopted by the Social Justice Foundation for their Adopt-A-River initiative.

Though the programme has enjoyed some favourable response from communities and schools, corporate support for the programme has not been as great as the Adopt-A-River unit would have liked. However, Samm said, the unit has been successful in its Green Fund application and will be furthering its community outreach with the funds awarded.

Preserving the health of the rivers was also based on financial considerations, said Raj Gosine, WASA’s head of Water Resources. “It is very expensive to treat poor water quality, so WASA’s motive was also financial.”

“The key thing is to stress that we can all make a positive contribution,” Gosine added.

Along with water quality monitoring and public education, WASA’s Adopt-A-River programme includes reforestation and forest rehabilitation, as well as clean-up exercises.

Global Water Partnership-Caribbean’s Programme Manager Dr. Natalie Boodram told IPS, “Programmes like Adopt-A-River which encourage reforestation of watershed and riparian zones (i.e., areas along the bank of a river or watercourse) help protect water supplies by encouraging water infiltration as opposed to surface runoff.

“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A young man looks out at the La Boca transporter bridge, built in 1914, which stopped operating in 1960. This emblem of the Riachuelo river in Buenos Aires is being rebuilt as part of the clean-up of the river basin and is scheduled to begin working again in 2015. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 13 2014 (IPS)

Immortalised by a famous tango, the “Niebla del riachuelo” (Mist over the Riachuelo river) has begun to dissipate over Argentina’s most polluted river, much of which is lined by factories and slums. But two centuries of neglect and a complex web of political and economic interests are hindering a clean-up plan that requires a broad, concerted effort.

The 64-km Matanzas-Riachuelo river cuts across 14 Buenos Aires municipalities as it runs from the western Buenos Aires working-class suburb of La Matanza to the picturesque, lively neighbourhood of La Boca, where it flows into the Río de la Plata or River Plate.

In the 1937 tango by Enrique Cadícamo and Juan Carlos Cobián the river is described as “a murky anchorage where boats end up moored at the pier, destined to stay there forever”. But far removed from the poetic license of a tango, for two centuries the riachuelo was actually a foul-smelling dump for untreated sewage and industrial waste.

Now, thanks to the Integral Environmental Clean-up Plan approved in 2011, the situation has changed in the river known as Matanza at its source and Riachuelo where it runs into the Rio de la Plata.

“The mist is gone….because it had to do with the water pollution…so poor Cadícamo wouldn’t be able to write Mist over the Riachuelo river today,” Antolín Magallanes, executive vice president of the Matanza Riachuelo River Basin Authority (ACUMAR), told Tierramérica.

ACUMAR, made up of representatives of the national, provincial and Buenos Aires city governments and of the 14 municipalities crossed by the river, was ordered by the Supreme Court to clean up the river in 2006.

“In 30 years of democracy, the creation of ACUMAR [in 2006] was an enormous and historic stride forward, because it made it possible for the first time for three jurisdictions, including governments of different political stripes, to coordinate the management [of the river] and for civil society to oversee it,” Magallanes said.

“That is part of the clean-up. It’s not just the garbage that’s in the river, which reflects the failure of the different parts to join forces in the past,” he added.

An industrial area along the Riachuelo, with the port in the background, in Buenos Aires. Since the first factories were built along the banks in 1801, industrial waste has been dumped into the river. There are now 15,000 factories, of which 459 were reconverted to prevent them from polluting, while another 1,300 are in the process of doing the same. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

More than five million people – of the 15.5 million inhabitants of Greater Buenos Aires – live in the basin, 10 percent of them in shantytowns. Of that proportion, 35 percent have no running water and 55 percent have no sewer services.

As part of the clean-up plan, some 60 sunken ships were removed from the river, which the tango describes as a “grim cemetery of boats which, when they die, dream nevertheless that to the sea they are bound to go.”

Around 1,500 tons of solid waste was also removed from the river and its banks, and the wide towpaths along the river were reopened and paved to provide access to and control over the river.

In addition, 1.5 million people were incorporated in the water supply network, health assessments are currently being carried out in high-risk areas, and 14 health centres are under construction.

“We are doing something that didn’t exist before: an environmental health diagnosis specific to the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, which will offer new results,” Magallanes said.

But the non-governmental Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN) said that “although what has been done was necessary, it falls far short in relation to the pending tasks.”

“Structurally very little was done,” the president of the independent Metropolitan Foundation, Pedro Del Piero, told Tierramérica. “Sanitation works have begun, with delays, to keep the Riachuelo from being an open-air sewer.”

The project has begun to go beyond the planning stage, thanks to 840 million dollars in financing from the World Bank.

A large waste water pipe will be built on the left bank of the Riachuelo to move the sewage to different treatment plants, to keep it from being dumped directly into the river. And a huge 11.5-km underground pipe will be installed to carry treated wastewater to the Rio de la Plata.

“That will make possible uses that have up to now been inconceivable, such as boat rides on the river and other recreational activities,” said World Bank official Daniel Mira-Salama.

Andrés Nápoli, director of FARN, is also calling for stricter controls of industrial pollution, along with a change in the current “extremely lax” legislation.

Environmental watchdog Greenpeace reported in June that there had been no improvement in the quality of the water, which still had only 0.5 mg of oxygen per litre, when the bare minimum to make aquatic life possible is 5.0 mg.

A 2008 study published in the Latin American Journal of Sedimentology and Basin Analysis found that soil on the banks of the river contained high levels of zinc, lead, copper, nickel and total chromium. But Magallanes wrote off the report as being based on “old” statistics.

Of a total of 15,000 factories officially registered in the river basin, 459 have been reconverted to stop polluting and another 1,300 – including the biggest polluters – are in the process of doing so.

“There is a high level of tension,” Magallanes admitted, adding that the basin “is kind of a metaphor for Argentina.”

The Riachuelo was at the centre of “the conquest, development and industrial revolution” in this country, and of the 2002-2003 economic crisis, which forced a number of factories to close down, driving up unemployment, he pointed out.

“That means there are many deeply rooted ways of doing things that must be changed, and awareness has to be raised among the companies,” he said.

Nápoli blamed the slow pace of change on “the huge web of political and economic interests in Buenos Aires,” aggravated by “political bickering” between the government of President Cristina Fernández and the opposition, which governs the capital.

ACUMAR “is constantly at the mercy of the political vicissitudes of the federal officials of the day,” Del Piero concurred.

But Magallanes said these were difficulties that were normal in democracy.

“In the past every jurisdiction did its cleaning up, had its little environmental manual, or didn’t do anything,” he argued.

ACUMAR relocated 122 families from high-risk zones, and is building over 1,900 housing units. It has also made headway with another 1,600 projects.

But Nápoli said it is not enough. “There are vulnerable people living along the banks of streams, or next to polluting industries. Six years after the Supreme Court ruling we still don’t know exactly who are at risk.”

He also called for the urgent removal or closure of open air dumps of varying sizes. Of the 186 dumps shut down in the basin, 70 percent are being used again, said Nápoli, who believes the origin of the problem dates back to a decision to put garbage disposal in the hands of municipal governments.

To solve the problem, ACUMAR is building municipal urban solid waste treatment plants.

“By clearing the mist off the river once and for all, we’re moving down a very positive path. From tension to transformation,” Magallanes said.

“Obviously there is still a great deal to be done,” he added. “But now we’re all finally talking about the river. That’s a good thing. It’s part of the recovery.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Technicians from Peru’s national water authority, ANA, inspecting a polluted stretch of river in the department of Huancavelica in south-central Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jun 10 2014 (IPS)

Peru urgently needs a national plan for the management of water over the next two decades, one that will take into account the effects of climate change and the social and environmental conflicts triggered by problems over water.

In his office surrounded by papers, maps and graphics, Humberto Cruz, an engineer with the national water authority, ANA, told IPS that the country desperately needs a plan to improve the unequal distribution of water and its inefficient use in this South American country.

Cruz and other technicians in ANA spent over a year drawing up a draft plan, which President Ollanta Humala said he would present in March. However, it has not yet been passed by Congress, despite the president’s emphasis of the importance of recognising that access to clean water is a basic right.

The situation involving water in Peru is not encouraging, although some efforts have been made, the ANA technicians told IPS.

“The information we have on the watersheds in the highlands and the Amazon rainforest is very generic….What I have found is data with a very high margin of error,” Cruz said.

The expert said that due to the margin of error, the estimates were up to 20 percent too high or too low, which means there is a distorted assessment of the water situation in the country – and as a result, decisions on access to water may be misguided.

There is no reliable information on the amount of water in 119 of the 159 river basins in the Andes highlands and Amazon jungle that supply household needs as well as different activities in the country, such as mining, the oil and gas industry and agriculture.

The 119 watersheds for which there is no reliable information represent 75 percent of the country’s river basins and over 95 percent of the volume of water available to the Peruvian population. And they are mainly in the areas where social conflicts have broken out over water.

“Due to the lack of reliable information, the decisions taken by the state with regard to productive activities in the interior of the country can affect communities that depend heavily on water, especially in the upper reaches of the watersheds,” environmental engineer Pavel Aquino, who saw these cases in his work in ANA and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, told IPS.

Aquino said that problems over access to water fuelled rural migration, which in turn drives up demand for water in cities along the coast, where it is especially scarce.

“There is unequal distribution of water in the national territory,” Ismael Muñoz, an economist at the Pontifical Catholic University, told IPS. “The result is that although 70 percent of the population lives along the Pacific coast, they have only 1.8 percent of the water, because of the way nature has distributed it,” he wrote in an academic paper.

Muñoz also noted that “because the water is mainly – up to 80 percent – used in agriculture, the state has prioritised coastal areas when it comes to investment in water supplies, accentuating the regional inequality with respect to the highlands and the jungle.”

The other problem, according to Aquino, is that “a high margin of error in the information on water supply in the river basins” means that if the estimate of the amount of water is too high, less money is invested in infrastructure works for water supply, such as reservoirs, dams, and water transfer or irrigation projects.

Conversely, if the estimate of the water supply is too low, more funds than are strictly necessary could be invested in such infrastructure, the engineer said.

There is only reliable data available on the main rivers along the coast. In the case of rivers in the Amazon jungle and the Andes, information has not been steadily available over the last 10 years, nor is there broad coverage, the ANA technicians said.

There is a shortage of hydrological stations to monitor the rivers. Peru has a total of 1,832 meteorological and hydrological stations, of which only 864 were operating as of March, according to the national meteorological and hydrological service, SENAMHI. And of these, just 142 measure water flow.

SENAMHI is in charge of keeping hydrological statistics and supplying them to the institutions involved, like ANA. But insufficient budget funds have made it impossible to install the necessary stations.

For that reason, ANA and the Environment Ministry are working to set up new stations in pilot basins.

According to SENAMHI technicians consulted by IPS, in the case of basins that do not have a single monitoring station, data is extrapolated from the information available on the nearest basins.

The ANA experts, meanwhile, told IPS that at least 10 years worth of solid data is needed in order for the results of the monitoring to be reliable.

The preliminary draft of the national plan on the management of water includes an assessment of the quality and quantity of water in the country’s river basins, based on this patchy data.

ANA’s press office informed IPS that the draft law is being reevaluated due to changes in the leadership of the water authority in April. The new head of the agency, Juan Carlos Sevilla, has not publicly spoken out on the plan that was already ready when he was appointed.

Josefa Rojas, the Environment Ministry’s head of climate change adaptation projects, told IPS that the preliminary evaluation of water supplies that was carried out was a step forward and that “we can’t wait until we have all of the information. It’s time to accumulate verified data in order to project what is going to happen with the water that we need in order to live.”

The Ministry has put a priority on the gathering of detailed information on 30 high-mountain basins, due to the accelerated melting of the glaciers which feed the rivers.

Although the plan is still pending, ANA managed to get the Ministry of Economy and Finance to transfer some four million dollars, of the 12.5 million dollars requested to carry out the studies needed to assess the quantity of water in 12 basins where social conflicts over water are raging.

ANA is also helping to organise the creation of water councils, to draw up new hydrological studies and improve watershed management in coordination with regional and local authorities, local residents and companies. But the challenges that lie ahead are daunting.

The Fuy river in the Los Ríos Region 750 km south of Santiago is one of the southern Chilean rivers that could provide water for the arid northern mining zones. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud and Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Three private sector initiatives are aimed at carrying water from the rivers in southern Chile to the arid north of the country by ship or through underwater or underground pipelines. The objective is to slake the thirst of the mining industry of this country, the world’s largest producer of copper.

The engineering works involved in the Aquatacama, Vía Hídrica del Norte and Sirius projects have passed the feasibility study stage. But they have not been approved by the authorities and environmental impact studies have not yet been carried out.

The companies behind the projects are seeking clients, especially in the mining industry, and are lobbying the government for the initiatives to be declared of social interest.

Their argument is compelling: the growing scarcity of water in the north, where the mining industry is concentrated, is limiting development and could give rise to social unrest.

Mining is not an industry that can be ignored: it accounts for 13 percent of Chile’s GDP and 36 percent of national employment.

This long, narrow South American country has abundant water resources, but they are distributed unequally. While to the south of Santiago average water availability is more than 10,000 cubic metres per person per year, to the north of the capital it is less than 800 cubic metres per person, according to a 2011 study by the World Bank.

Copper mining alone consumes 12,615 litres per second of freshwater, according to the Mining Council.

The three projects are presented as a solution to the gap between supply and demand, which will continue to grow.

Aquatacama, a project of the French companies Vía Marina and Vinci, among others, spent 1.4 million dollars on a study that proposes transporting water from the mouth of the Rapel, Maule and Bío Bío rivers in south-central Chile to Arica, 2,500 km away in the extreme north, through a pipeline under the Pacific ocean.

The route was analysed by navy and port authority technical experts.

According to Aquatacama, the potential demand from the central city of Valparaíso to Arica (2,000 km apart) is between 30 and 100 cubic metres per second and distribution points could be installed every 100 km.

The project initially proposes carrying water from Rapel to Coquimbo, some 400 km, to supply water distributors, the Andina mining company that belongs to the state-run copper mining Corporación del Cobre de Chile, and towns in the area.

Energy consumption would be less than 0.9 kWh per cubic metre – four times less than the consumption involved in the desalination of saltwater, according to the companies behind the initiative.

Vía Hídrica del Norte, of the Chilean-Spanish consortium Euro Engineering Group, would transport 25 cubic metres per second in underground steel pipes three to four metres in diameter, for a distance of 2,400 km.

The goal is to supply the mining industry through a pipeline running from sea level to 4,300 metres altitude.

The country’s main copper deposits are in the north, near the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth. The lack of water in that area also affects agriculture and human consumption. Water is distributed by tanker trucks and families who can afford it purchase bottled water for cooking and drinking.

Sirius, a Chilean project, would complement other initiatives, and would require an initial investment of 50 to 60 million dollars. Its target is the area of Copiapó, 800 km north of Santiago, where two ships a month would carry up to 3.5 million cubic metres of water for human consumption.

To that end, some 1,500 cubic metres per second would have to be extracted from a river in the southern region of Patagonia. The company says less than 10 percent of the water in the river would be used, based on statistics from the Dirección Nacional de Aguas, the Chilean water authority.

“The water deficit limits the prospects for development in the northern regions, which need to be supplied with products and services from other parts of the country,” Nicolás Jadue, the director of the Centro de Modelamiento de Negocios business modelling centre at the private Universidad Mayor, told Tierramérica.

“Increasing supply would generate important benefits without a doubt,” he added. But these projects must be analysed “from the perspective of the social good,” he suggested.

Jadue said that introducing water in the water-scarce north will fuel conflicts between the main sectors that compete for water – agriculture and mining.

But the proposed solutions to address the scarcity sometimes clash.

Cristian Silva, a mentor for the Sirius project, believes the scarcity reflects a lack of regulation. “The price of water has to be raised. The question is who will pay the cost,” he said.

Some legislators propose renationalising water, which was privatised during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, while social organisations are calling for demonstrations and mobilisations to demand a national water strategy.

“Good use of water is better than dozens of local projects,” Axel Dourojeanni, a consultant to United Nations agencies and the former national director of the Peruvian government office on water and soil, said at the World Copper Conference held Apr. 7-9 in Santiago.

“There are as of yet no studies of the necessary depth to determine the social, economic and environmental viability of transferring water from the south to the north,” Dourojeanni told Tierramérica. “And this option should not be studied separately from others, to improve efficiency, good use and land-use zoning.

“The water transfer is necessary, but it also creates dependence and has a high cost,” he said. “Moreover, it is essential to assess the effects on the place where the water is extracted.”

Lucio Cuenca, director of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA), said the idea underlying these projects, that freshwater from the rivers is lost to the sea, “is inspired by exclusively economic criteria, and runs counter to the logic of ecosystems.”

These are “false solutions that conceal the reality, mainly of the north, where the mining industry has been permitted to expand beyond all possible limits of tolerance of the ecosystems,” he told Tierramérica.

Rodrigo Villablanca, the head of the Diaguita Community of the central Huasco Valley, which is fighting the approval of the Pascua Lama gold-mining project, told Tierramérica that “mining companies not only consume large quantities of water but also destroy glaciers in the upper altitudes of the basins even long before they start producing.

“Now they want to take water from another ecological system that will also be damaged,” he said.

In Cuenca’s view, the solution to the water crisis must involve a reduction of the intensity of mining industry investment “and a review of the policy for the management of natural resources.”

Dourojeanni said “The most urgent thing is to improve water governance based on a comparison between the current and the hoped-for situation, which should be clearly outlined.

“To do that, a strict protocol must be followed, like the one being developed by the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development], which is aimed at improving water management, free of ideologies or preconceived notions about privatising or nationalising,” said Dourojeanni.

“Countries where everything has been nationalised suffer problems similar to those of Chile, so the issue goes beyond the question of nationalisation or privatisation,” he argued.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Riachuelo river keeps its iron bridges and its muddy waters. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 12 2013 (IPS)

The process of cleaning up the Matanza-Riachuelo river, which runs through the Argentine capital, shows remarkable progress. But the biggest challenge is purifying the water in the basin, which has been damaged by centuries of neglect.

“We cannot yet see chemical changes in the river,” admitted biochemist Oscar Deina, chief executive of the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin Authority (ACUMAR), which was established in 2006 and is comprised of representatives of the national government, the autonomous city of Buenos Aires and 14 adjoining districts of the province of the same name.

Since ACUMAR began to clean up the river, the banks are clear of garbage and slum housing, and the woodlands have grown back.  The junk in the bed was removed, and systematic checks of industries and construction works are conducted to treat wastewater.

Gone are the islands of floating trash and rusted ship skeletons. But the water still has the same level of pollution as when measurements began five years ago. Oxygen is short, and nitrate, phosphorus, oils, hydrocarbons and heavy metals like arsenic, lead, chromium and copper are abundant.

The river begins with the name Matanza and runs through the northeast of the province of Buenos Aires, changing its name to Riachuelo when it reaches the borders of the Argentinian capital, and flows into the Rio de la Plata, near the famous neighborhood of La Boca.

The 64-kilometre extension of this watercourse and its 232 tributaries form a basin of 2,240 square kilometres, where about six million people live alongside 25,000 commercial and industrial establishments.

The steady polluting of this river’s plains has gone on for more than 200 years.  It has been fed garbage, industrial effluents and untreated sewage, making it the most toxic waterway in the country.

But a 2006 ruling by Argentina’s Supreme Court, which ordered a restoration of the environmental situation of the basin and an improvement in the quality of life of the most affected communities, marked a turning point.

The court appointed Judge Luis Armella to be in charge of enforcing the judgment and periodically reporting on the progress of the cleaning process, though he was subsequently embroiled in a corruption scandal and removed from the case.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, the recovery plan is moving ahead, and non-governmental organisations monitoring the process have recognised progress.

But more than six years after the ruling, the lack of progress in improving the quality of the river remains a concern.

This month, Greenpeace released a report entitled, “Las aguas siguen bajando turbias” (The waters continue to grow murky), which reviews the results of the checks performed on the 60 monitoring points installed by ACUMAR.

The study goes into an analysis of the Association of Residents of La Boca, which recognised that “it is the first time in the disastrous history of two centuries of pollution that improvements (have) materialised in the basin”, but also noted continued pollution.

The study, which denounces ACUMAR’s rules as “very lenient” with industrial wastes, points out that Greenpeace’s analysis indicates that little progress has been made on improving the quality of surface water.

The report also questions the lack of ambition of the recovery plan, which aims to achieve a “passive recreational use” of the river, working just to improve the landscape between those navigating the course or walking along its banks, but not making it possible to have some form of contact with the water.

“There are points where you can see an improvement (in water quality), but these gains are reversed in subsequent tests, meaning that the trend is not favorable,” Riachuelo’s campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, Lorena Pujó, told IPS.

The expert believes ACUMAR should study the ability of the river to purify itself and the level of effluent that it can tolerate, adding that if weak standards are implemented, industries can get away with simply diluting pollutants, and the river will continue to be polluted and remain devoid of oxygen.

“The idea is not that companies go to pollute somewhere else, but that they change the way they produce, starting with the largest ones, because that will generate the greatest impact,” said Pujó. She acknowledged that change cannot come overnight but predicted that, if the right work is undertaken now, progress will be visible in 25 years.

Even the CEO of ACUMAR, Oscar Deina, told IPS that the objectives of the plan are “under review”.

“Aiming for recreational use (of the river) was the first stage…but now we aspire to much more. It is true that in the watercourse we still fail to see chemical changes, but we took out piles of junk, lumber and garbage. We have rebuilt the river banks and slopes, and cleaned the image,” Deina added.

“The industrial issue is the most difficult for us because we have to achieve the reconversion,” he acknowledged. Deina said 1,700 of the more than 25,000 registered establishments were polluters, and that around 800 had almost finished works required to conform to the reconversion efforts, but more needed to be done.

“We’re talking to companies so they know that the requirements are a first step, but later, depending on the location of the company and the flow of the river, in each case we will determine how much they can pour in,” he explained.

According to Deina, there are records of ecosystems recovering in the basin’s upper section, but he admitted that sector is the least affected by pollution. “In the middle and lower basin complications are greater,” he said.

He also assured that uses of the river could be re-categorised and modified. He said parameters surrounding the permitted dumping of hazardous materials could be narrowed, adding that such a process requires a better understanding of the “flow and dynamics” of the river basin.

In May, a team of experts from universities located in the basin will study what to do with the sludge, which accounts for most of the pollution in the riverbed.

“There are four to six metres of sediment. Some say that we should not touch it so it does not interact with the water column, but others claim it can be taken out. We have to analyse it,” Deina said.

One of the small dams near the Dos Cochos River with water from a recent rainfall. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
JANUÁRIA, Brazil, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

José Geraldo Matos fondly recalls the massive traíras (Hoplias sp), carnivorous freshwater fish found in the lagoons and rivers of Brazil, that he used to catch in the Dos Cochos River just a few metres from his house.

That was three decades ago, before sedimentation and the loss of its sources turned the 38-kilometre-long river into an intermittent stream. Although returning the river to its original conditions may seem like an impossible task, concerted efforts have succeeded in recovering at least part of its former flow.

“Where I live, it only dried up for around three weeks this year. In the past it disappeared for four or five months,” reports Jaci Borges, a local resident and activist with Caritas, a Catholic organisation that supports this and many other solidarity-based development initiatives in the area.

Saving the Dos Cochos and other small rivers is key to revitalising the São Francisco River, the largest waterway in northeastern Brazil. Nine large and medium-sized hydroelectric dams on the São Francisco provide the region with electricity. The Dos Cochos, a sub-tributary, forms part of its watershed.

Of the 36 direct tributaries of the São Francisco, known as the “river of national integration” because it flows through the centre and northeast of Brazil, 16 were already intermittent in 2005, according to journalist Marco Antonio Coelho, the author of a book about the river’s evolution, “Os Descaminhos do São Francisco”.

The population living along the banks of the Dos Cochos – 300 families or around 1,500 people – began to react to the deterioration of their river in 2001. Preparations for taking action, which included the creation of the Dos Cochos River Sub-Watershed Association and discussion of what to do, lasted three years.

Beginning in 2004, they constructed 850 “barraginhas”, small circular dams near highways and other roads where the water from river flooding or heavy rains flows. This prevents sediment, which is abundant because of the sandy soil in the area, from being washed into the river and continuing to block it.

In addition, the land around these small dams becomes moist and feeds the water table in an area where rain is scarce and serious droughts are frequent, such as the one afflicting the semi-arid Brazilian northeast since last year.

The Dos Cochos River flows through the municipalities of Cônego Marinho and Januária, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais. Here the climate is similar to that in the rest of the interior of northeastern Brazil, where the average annual rainfall ranges from 250 to 750 millimetres.

In addition to the dams, work has been underway for the last three years to restore the forests along the river, by building a fence 30 metres from its banks to keep cattle out. Although not everyone has joined in this campaign, it is still impressive to see how the vegetation has naturally recovered in the areas that have been protected, without the need for planting new trees, Matos tells Tierramérica*.

The little river has become a model for successful revitalisation, earning press and television coverage in recent years.

The river’s deterioration was caused by deforestation of nearby hills and the replacement of native forests with eucalyptus plantations for charcoal production, stimulated by government policies since the 1970s. The river’s gradual death also dealt a heavy blow to local agricultural production.

“Many of its sources dried up, some of them blocked by sediment,” said Borges.

Minas Gerais is the Brazilian state with the greatest mining activity, which is in turn linked to railway transportation and the iron and steel industry, both major consumers of charcoal.

But extensive cattle grazing has also contributed to the river’s deterioration, due to the damage caused to the forest and soil along its banks, until the protective fence was installed. In addition, cattle ranching required the replacement of the natural vegetation with large stretches of pasture land, which is more prone to erosion and thus results in more sediment being washed into the river.

Matos, 57, and his five brothers share 200 hectares of land where they raise crops and cattle. Of his three sons, one has already moved to the nearby city, Januária, and “another of them wants to go, too,” he lamented.

“Living here is good, but surviving is difficult,” because rainfall is very irregular, and “after two months without rain, everything is lost,” he said.

Another difficulty facing local communities is the fact that the highways are unpaved and do not receive adequate maintenance, said Borges. This lack of attention from the municipal authorities not only affects transportation, but also the “barraginhas” constructed to save the river.

The most recent rains broke the poorly constructed dikes along a stretch of highway where they were installed roughly 50 metres apart to hold back the sudden rush of water. This led to a domino effect in which the barraginhas further downstream could not withstand the overflow of water that was not properly contained upstream, Borges explained.

The local watershed association plans to call on the municipal authorities to reform a 6.5-kilometre stretch of highway in order to test a model that could serve later for its entire length, he added.

The recovery of this small river through the efforts of the local communities themselves could serve as an example for the revitalisation of the São Francisco, a promise made by the federal government to compensate for the diversion of this major river – a major undertaking aimed at improving the water supply in four states in the northeast that will benefit 12 million people, according to the official plans.

But very little is being done, except for basic – and incomplete – clean-up efforts in a few cities, and nothing to reforest the banks of the river and its tributaries, according to Roberto Malvezzi of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission.

Numerous studies estimate that the São Francisco has lost a third of its flow since the mid-20th century. Many of its tributaries and sub-tributaries dried up in Minas Gerais, where most of its branches originate.

Cattle ranching and monoculture plantations – of soybeans, coffee, rice and other grains, in addition to eucalyptus trees – provoke deforestation and are the main causes of this water disaster, by “breaking the hydrologic cycle,” said Apolon Heringuer-Lisboa, founder and director of the Manuelzão Project, which is aimed at recuperating the Das Velhas River.

The main problem with the Das Velhas is that it runs through the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, and is therefore polluted with the city’s urban and industrial wastewater before flowing into the São Francisco.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

Local residents cleaning up a river in the Lower Lempa River Basin. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN NICOLÁS LEMPA, El Salvador , Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Armed with chainsaws, machetes and shovels, local residents of El Salvador’s Lower Lempa River Basin, near the Pacific Ocean, are unblocking the flow of rivers and pruning the branches of trees on riverbanks to keep them from falling into the chocolate-colored water.

One team is working on clearing the El Espino River. Another is doing the same in El Borbollón, also located in the Lower Lempa River Basin in the department of Usulután, in southwest El Salvador.

When the water flows more freely, there is less chance of the rivers overflowing and flooding nearby crops, an increasingly frequent occurrence due to alterations in the cycle of rains and dry spells.

Several kilometres to the south, in the mangrove forests of Jiquilisco Bay, Brenda Arely Sánchez walks waist-deep in water along a channel in the Cuche de Monte swamp, which she and a small army of women have reopened with machetes in order to improve the flow of saltwater and promote the recovery of the mangrove trees.

The channel, blocked for years by roots and sediment, no longer allowed seawater to flow in during high tide. As a result, 70 hectares of mangrove trees were slowing dying, because these species need a saltwater environment to survive.

“With pure hard work, we removed all of the mud and roots from the channel in plastic containers,” said Sánchez, one of 30 women who participated in the effort.

These women and men are part of the Mangle Association, based in the Lower Lempa River Basin and Jiquilisco Bay, an area declared as the Xiriualtique Jiquilisco Biosphere Reserve in 2007 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The Mangle Association’s efforts range from the protection of biological diversity to risk management to reduce vulnerability to the floods that are growing more severe year after year.

The once-fertile lands of the Lower Lempa basin – a coastal plain that encompasses the largest stretch of mangroves in El Salvador – were used by large landholders for cotton plantations until the 1970s, when production declined.

When the Salvadoran civil war was ended by the peace agreements of 1992, many former combatants from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), then a guerrilla group and now the ruling political party, were given parcels of land in this area to facilitate their reintegration into civilian life.

This explains the abundance of community organisations. Local residents say that the organisational traditions developed in times of war are now being applied to social and environmental projects, primarily to confront what everyone identifies as the effects of climate change.

“In the past we knew that the rains would start in May and end in October. Now nobody knows when they will start or end, if there is going to be a drought or a storm,” Carlos Barahona, the coordinator of the river clean-up work and the opening of the channel in Cuche de Monte, told Tierramérica.*

Up until now, half of the dredging of 4.2 km of the El Espino and El Borbollón Rivers has been completed. The work began in July and was financed by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources after the destruction wrought by Tropical Depression 12-E in October 2011.

The storm was the most severe weather event ever recorded in El Salvador, dumping 1,513 mm of rain, the equivalent of 42 percent of the average annual rainfall during the 1971-2000 period, according to an October 2011 assessment by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

There were 35 deaths and an estimated 900 million dollars in losses and damages. The area hardest hit was the Lower Lempa basin.

“Hurricane Mitch (1998) was bad, but this was worse. We left our houses and headed for the shelters when the water was almost up to our necks,” recalled Sánchez.

Climate change has been linked to the variations in precipitation patterns and heavier rainfalls. But flooding in this area lasts longer because the drainage channels, constructed during the cotton boom, are unable to empty out properly in the sediment-filled El Espino and El Borbollón Rivers.

Another cause of flooding is the water released from the 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric dam, located upstream on the Lempa River, when torrential rains make it necessary to open the floodgates to prevent it from collapsing.

The gates are often opened without prior warning, the local residents complain. As a result, the lower stretch of the Lempa, the country’s longest river, overflows and floods some 20 communities.

“We are always going to have floods, but now that the rivers have been cleared, the water will drain away more quickly,” stressed Barahona.
In addition, these rivers will be navigable once again, which means farmers and fisherfolk will be able to transport their products in canoes.

The opening of the channel in the Cuche de Monte swamp, stretching four kilometres, has been bearing fruit since the work began in July. The death of 70 hectares of mangrove trees has been halted; new mangrove shoots have begun sprouting, and the fish and shellfish that disappeared when the channel was blocked have returned.

Red snapper, catfish, bass and shrimps are among the species observed in the waters of the swamp, said José Manuel González, a biosphere reserve warden and Lower Lempa native.

Due to the importance of the species found here, the reserve has been protected since 2005 by the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971.

“The project is already helping people, because everyone benefits from the recovery of the mangrove forest, and at the same time, it is providing employment for the families involved in the work,” González told Tierramérica.

The efforts are supported through the El Salvador Fund for the Americas Initiative, an agreement signed in 1993 by the governments of El Salvador and the United States to provide debt relief for the Central American country in exchange for investment in environmental projects.

The fund created for this purpose is endowed with 41.4 million dollars.

The goal in Cuche de Monte is for the ecosystem to regenerate naturally through ecological mangrove restoration (ERM). Instead of manual planting of one or more species of mangrove trees, this method involves identifying the causes of damage and subsequently working to remedy them.

ERM is taught in the area by experts from the Mangrove Action Project (MAP). “Nature knows best which mangrove species should be growing there,” said Barahona.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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