Abstract
Despite advances in water resources management and planning, the São Francisco River Basin in Brazil has suffered from systematic drought problems in recent years, leading to severe human and environmental water security threats. This paper aims to track the water security for different periods and its relations with the changes in physical and natural asset conditions. The paper explores how investment planning to mitigate the water security threats and explore opportunities to increase the value of investments. The paper finds that grey infrastructure has regulated threats from increasing in the downstream of the river basin, however, continuous increase in water security threats in the upstream of the basin threatens water security downstream. This is evident from the spatial connectivity and unidirection externalities. As the capacity to further increase in grey investment is reaching its limit in the downstream, the increases in green infrastructure investment upstream, especially in the Grande River basin, could be one the way to reduce the externalities and minimise the water security risks.
Highlights
The water security issue is intertwined with the economic development of Brazil.Despite that Brazil encompasses 12% of total continental surface water of the world [1], the resources’ unequal spatial and temporal distribution contributes to water insecurity along with occurrences of frequent droughts and floods
The Brazilian Water Security Plan [2] is planning a massive investment of 5 billion USD until 2035 to mitigate such threats to water security
The results of the water security threats demonstrate a considerable number of micro basins with higher value of water security threat
Summary
Despite that Brazil encompasses 12% of total continental surface water of the world [1], the resources’ unequal spatial and temporal distribution contributes to water insecurity along with occurrences of frequent droughts and floods. For instance, account for 84% of the natural disasters during the period 1991 and 2012 and affected about 127 million people [1]. The economic impacts of these events accounted for USD 55 billion in terms of economic losses. The Brazilian Water Security Plan [2] is planning a massive investment of 5 billion USD until 2035 to mitigate such threats to water security. Such investment mainly includes building hard infrastructure, water storage reservoirs and dams
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