Serviços ecossistêmicos e provisão de água em quantidade e qualidade: traduzindo graficamente o conhecimento científico para a gestão

Abstract

The impacts of the human being on the planet's ecosystems have adversely affected the quantity, regularity of supply, and the quality of the water resources required for his own well-being. As a result, there is a real possibility of unprecedented imminent water crisis. Such a risk requires the public management systems, in addition to the will and political capacity to face it in a democratic way, the ability to understand how human impacts affect the natural processes that guarantee the availability of water. This understanding is one of the essential elements of decision-making processes. Integrated management approaches to the ecosystem base represent alternatives to the traditional water management strategy, which is focused on maximizing supply and reducing its variability. They recognize ecosystems as integrating units of the systems to be managed (terrestrial, aquatic and human) and seek to balance their conservation and the anthropic use of natural resources. To this end, they value the maintenance of the resilience of these systems in order to maintain the services provided by the ecosystems. In a democratic process of water management, science, as a public good, has important roles to make: to translate, for the sectors involved, the state of the art of scientific models on the functioning of the systems to be managed and to contribute to the elaboration of scenarios on probable future derived from different management alternatives. The present work carried out systematic reviews of the scientific literature to identify: (a) the ecosystem services provided by the hydrographic basins; (b) the ecological and hydrological processes that specifically support ecosystem services for the supply of water in quantity and quality for human use; and (c) the major anthropic impacts that lead to the loss of these services. This information has been synthesized and organized in the form of illustrations that seek to outline the ways in which these services can be maintained or lost, depending on how mankind occupies river basins. The illustrations will be made available to the sectors of the society involved with water resources policies in order to facilitate the contribution of up-to-date scientific knowledge on the subject. They should be especially useful to the technical staff of planning and management bodies of water resources in Brazil. In addition, they may be useful to other audiences, such as organized civil society and the education sector.