Hydro-businesses: National and Global Demands on the São Francisco River Basin Environment of Brazil

Abstract

SUMMARY: The São Francisco River provided very obvious, close-by forms of sustenance for local communities. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the river became the place for large hydro-electric facilities, large-scale flooding, and population resettlement. A decade later, the federal government began working on pilot irrigation projects that would lead to areas described today as the Brazilian California. Hydro-power for Brazilian cities such as Recife and Salvador and irrigation for grapes and mangoes destined for the United States and Europe are among the eco-system services this river supplies. The purpose of federal policies for the north-east went beyond mitigation of the consequences of droughts, the hydraulic approach, and started to follow an economic approach based upon development; as a consequence, river and user came to be distant from one another. The two major intensive uses of the river, electricity and irrigation, threaten the long-term sustainability of this system.

Hatchery tanks induce intense reduction in microbiota diversity associated with gills and guts of two endemic species of the São Francisco River

“…The SFR is widely afflicted by the cumulative effects of several anthropogenic impact sources, such as the introduction of invasive species (Linares et al, 2019); suppression of riverine vegetation (Holanda et al, 2009); mining and damming for hydropower generation activities (Nascimento and Becker, 2010), and urban and rural pollution (Ribeiro et al, 2012) (Figure 1). In addition, during the last decade, unstable hydrological regimes in dry regions (Otto et al, 2015;Getirana, 2016;Gudmundsson et al, 2021) and overfishing have contributed to ever-decreasing fish stocks (Barbosa et al, 2017;Figueiredo, 2018).…”