As Brazil continues to deliberately destroy their forest,
and therefore their ecosystem, the water supply is lowering dangerously. Two
thirds of the Brazil’s electricity comes from dammed rivers, and the entirety
of their power is quickly depleting. Two major reservoir networks, Cantareira
and the Alto Tiete, provide Sao Paulo’s water supply. At this moment, the Alto
Tiete is at 15% capacity and Cantareira is at 5%, which science advisors say is
the worst drought in 80 years. As a city that runs mainly on hydroelectricity,
this will be devastating if they trend continues. Also, the people of Sao Paulo
are being restricted to only two days of water use per week.
As this concern becomes much more prevalent, officials are
trying to figure out ways to finally deal with the problem, including planting
trees near river beds in order to keep them more susceptible to capturing
water. Although the biggest reservoir of water is forests and without them,
capturing more water will be hard, as we have seen before. The problem here is
that deforestation is a double hitter to the water supply in an ecosystem. By
this, I mean that rain clouds would form from the thick amazon jungle and as it
rains, the trees would capture a lot of the rain and release it over more time.
With the trees gone, you see not as many rain clouds, and less water from them
when they do. Climate researcher, Antonio Donate Nobre, says that 20% of the
forest is being clear-cut and another 7% has been burned due to the parts of
the forest that were once surrounded by forest-proof woodland now being gone.
Brazil is in over there heads in this situation. They are
destroying so much of the Amazon and not caring about what that will look like
tomorrow. Now it has caught up to them and they have a disaster on their hands,
all for money.
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