Sao Paulo faces more devastating water shortages if farmers continue to clear the Amazon forest, the utility chief who recently steered the biggest city in the Americas from the edge of drought catastrophe said.
Jerson Kelman, president of Companhia de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo (Basic Sanitation Co of the State of Sao Paulo, SABESP), said he felt a duty to speak out because he is a citizen as well as the head of a water company who has seen firsthand how close the metropolis of 21 million people had come to a breakdown.
“We should not transform the Amazon into pastureland. The Amazon creates a movement of water. If the forest is cut, we will be in trouble,” he said in an interview.
Illustration: Mountain people
As one of the foremost authorities on water supply and hydropower in Brazil, Kelman’s comments are likely to reignite a debate — resisted by the country’s powerful agriculture lobby — about the link between the world’s biggest forest, climate change and a possible recurrence of the 2014 to 2015 drought.
That was no ordinary dry period. Over a 12-month period, rainfall was half that of the previous worst year on records stretching back to the early 20th century. By January 2015, the volume of water at the main Cantareira reservoir system was down to 5 percent — barely a month’s supply.
Dozens of municipalities on the periphery of Sao Paulo declared “states of calamity,” which allowed for military intervention and emergency funds from the federal government.
At Itu — the worst-affected city — there was fighting, theft and the looting of emergency water trucks. Many communities’ taps flowed for only a few hours every four days. In some condominiums, residents took buckets from swimming pools to flush toilets, argued over scarce communal supplies and denounced neighbors who washed their cars.
The dystopia even reached the city’s main commercial district around Avenida Paulista, where the swanky Bossano restaurant served guests with plastic plates and cutlery because there was insufficient water for dishwashers, and Starbucks only offered bottled beer and cans of Coke because there was not enough water for coffee.
With elections due the following year, the Sao Paulo state and city governments refused to declare an emergency.
However, the Guardian has learned from multiple sources that the authorities were far more worried than they admitted to the public at the time.
Today, there is a sense of calm at the control center of SABESP, which is 50.1 percent owned by the government.
However, real-time data displayed on giant screens and a dozen individual monitors show reservoirs are almost back to precrisis levels. Automated pumping stations — where water pressure to 220 neighborhoods can be adjusted at the click of a mouse — are functioning normally.
When asked to recall how different it felt at the height of the crisis, SABESP senior official Silvana Franco loudly sucked in a breath and shook her head.
“We were desperate. The reservoir level was just going down and down. We knew that when people do not have water, they go crazy. We had seen the protests in smaller cities where people were breaking into property to steal water. We imagined what it would be like here with 21 million people. We thought about the hospitals unable to treat patients and children having to stay home from school. It would be chaos,” she said.
She said her boss was so worried his hair had turned white.
At the nadir, the military came to check whether the center’s gates and perimeter were secure.
This had never happened before and added to the staff’s fears of apocalyptic chaos, she said.
“There were about five of them in uniform with guns. They wanted to see how resilient this center could be because we control the water,” she said.
SABESP has planted 45,000 hectares of trees on its land and has seen the benefits in terms of climate regulation, Kelman said. However, there are limits to what he is able or willing to do.
The company has no authority over Amazon conservation and, because it is a business that must generate profits, there is no incentive to scale back demand and sales. SABESP has already dropped the measure that was most effective during the crisis — a financial reward for households that reduced water use.
Eighty percent of customers received these incentives, which eased the pressure on the supply system more than other emergency measures, such as tapping “dead water” from the reservoirs and interlinking networks.
The benefits of these behavioral changes are still evident today as consumption remains more than 10 percent below precrisis levels even though the taps are flowing freely.
However, on the corporate side of its business, SABESP offers discounts to companies that are heavy consumers. Highlighting the negative impact of market pressures, this controversial policy was introduced to dissuade major clients from digging their own wells or seeking rival suppliers.
SABESP has strengthened long-term drought resilience by focusing on expensive, supply-side engineering works that expand the water footprint of the city.
At Jaguari reservoir — about a two-hour drive from the city center — engineers are putting the finishing touches on a series of giant pumps, pipes and tunnels that will create an 18km link to the Cantareira system.
It is one of three mega projects that will together cost close to 3 billion reals (US$924 million) — a huge chunk of SABESP’s budget — but should provide enough extra backup capacity to withstand a drought as bad as the one that hit two years ago.
“I know that in three or four years, some politicians will complain we are wasting money on infrastructure that sits idle. People forget easily, but now nature has shown us what she can do; the least the population can expect is that decisionmakers prepare for rare events. If something worse comes, then we have a problem,” Kelman said.
There is already criticism. Business groups want more of a priority on profitability so a bigger share of SABESP’s stock can be privatized.
Environmental groups are unhappy that more spending on infrastructure means less for sewage treatment and reforestation of areas near water sources that are currently occupied by shanty towns. If these problems could be solved, the city could once again tap its two most central reservoirs — Billings and Guarapiranga — and the Tiete River, all of which are currently too contaminated for use.
Malu Ribeiro, coordinator for the conservation movement SOS Mata Atlantica’s water network program, said: “It is possible to improve by investing in forests and water treatment, but that is not happening. So of course this [kind of drought] will happen again. The city is still growing. There is more deforestation. More people are living next to water sources. We have learned little or nothing from the crisis.”
WWF water stewardship specialist Alexis Morgan agrees that the government’s response has been piecemeal.
“A good crisis has gone to waste in terms of the public-level response. Businesses have learned that demand-side solutions are cheaper and easier. That should be the place to start, but engineers invariably want to put more supply in the system. They fail to recognize that green assets [forests] appreciate over time unlike grey assets [concrete dams]. The government should be looking at both,” he said.
The challenge of building climate resilience is increasingly important and not just in Brazil. According to a new WWF study, Sao Paulo ranks only eighth on the list of the world’s most drought-vulnerable megacities.
The No. 1 city is Cape Town, which is in the midst of its worst-ever water shortage and is now facing many of the difficult decisions that Kelman and others had to grapple with two years ago.
In Sao Paulo, a full meltdown was avoided. The most extreme contingency plans were not needed, but it was close. If it had not been for a little rain and some drastic measures, SABESP could have faced the fury of 21 million thirsty customers.
For Kelman, the lessons are fourfold: good supply-side engineering, sensible demand-management through pricing mechanisms, transparency so that the public are on the side of the government in saving water, and accepting that past data are no longer a reliable guide as a result of climate change and land-use change.
“The Sao Paulo experience shows us we can not rely on past assumptions. We need to hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” he said.
He is also looking at the causes. Global climate change and regional deforestation are at the top of the list.
Kelman said the loss of the Amazon is increasing climate risks for Sao Paulo because the forest helps to circulate water down from the tropics in a process known as evapotranspiration.
“Now I enter a minefield,” he said, reflecting the sensitivity of the topic.
There are no statistical models for this yet and the science remains controversial due to the implications for the powerful agricultural lobby, which clears trees for farms, and the hydropower industry, which floods forest for dams.
The best-known exponent is Space Research Institute climatologist Antonio Nobre, who calls the Amazon a “biotic pump” that provides the energy for “rivers in the sky” to flow thousands of kilometers to Sao Paulo.
Without this booster, the southeast of Brazil would likely be a desert like many other regions at the same latitude, he said.
Fears of water riots in a country that boasts 12 percent of the world’s rivers and lakes would once have seemed outlandish, but they are a real and growing concern due to increased consumption, and climate disruption on a global and regional level.
Kelman believes there are lessons here for the Brazillian government and cities around the world.
Among the most important is that past records are no longer a reliable guide to future risks. This came as a shock to Kelman, who wrote his doctoral paper on a historical data analysis — technically known as the stationary series statistical method — which is used to set the parameters for the climate resilience of water and hydropower supply systems.
Based on these old statistics, he calculated the chance of a drought like that of 2014 to 2015 as 0.4 percent, or once in 250 years. It was twice as severe as the planner’s worst forecasts, forcing him into a period of philosophical self-reflection.
“We had excellent data — 83 years worth — and we were prepared for the worst on record, but nature showed us that we cannot rely on stationary series statistics as we did in the past. We should prepare for the unknown,” he said.
Another SABESP official, who asked not to be named, described the situation as “completely out of control.”
A senior government adviser, who also asked for anonymity, concurred.
“The risks we discussed in private were far greater than those discussed in public at the time,” the official said.
Due to fears of a mob invasion, the authorities established a backup control center in a different location. They also installed special pipes to circumvent the main distribution system and ensure water could be directly provided to the 500 most important buildings in the city, including large hospitals, dialysis centers and prisons, even if the rest of the city ran dry. Everyone else, they imagined, would have to take buckets and kettles to city squares where they would have to line up for supplies from water trucks.
“It would have been like sub-Saharan Africa,” one senior official said.
This priority list was kept secret. Kelman, who is also the founder of the Brazilian Water Resources Association and was drafted in as drought buster in January 2015, said transparency was generally desirable, but in this case the authorities had no choice.
“It was like wartime. We could not tell anyone which buildings were on the list because the supply might have been disrupted. If things went wrong, we did not know what might happen. There could have been riots in the street,” Kelman said.
The theory has been attacked. Benedito Braga, president of the World Water Council and secretary of Sanitation and Water Resources for the state of Sao Paulo, dismissed any link between the drought and the Amazon.
“If deforestation was causing this impact then how do you explain the floods that we saw in 2016. I would say they are both signs of natural variability — 2014 to 2015 was an outlier, not a sign of a trend,” he said.
There is more acceptance among meteorologists who believe the Amazon serves as a link between two key corridors of humidity — the Intertropical Convergence Zone along the equator and the South Atlantic Convergence Zone that stretches down to the southeast of Brazil. The latter is crucial to water supply and the hydropower industry because it brings consistent rainfall for several days which fills reservoirs far more effectively than occasional drizzles.
“Before 2013, there would be three or four convergence rainfalls in Sao Paulo every year, but in 2015, there was only one. Last year there was only one and this year there has so far been only one. That means we are still using more water than is naturally replaced,” said Camila Ramos, a meteorologist for private forecasting agency Climatempo.
“If the Amazon forest disappears, it would be plausible to assume that the rainfall volumes would drop in Sao Paulo as the humidity supply towards the southeast might decrease,” she said.
This article is part of the Guardian’s “Cities in the spotlight” series, which is supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
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