Análises das relações entre consumo de água e crescimento urbano em pequenos municípios da Paraíba.

Abstract

Managing a municipal water system is critical to maintaining cities and supporting societies' water security. Planning for the growth of urban centers along with urban water management is a challenging task for public service administrators and policy makers, especially in areas with a semi-arid climate to the detriment of extreme drought events. From this perspective, this research aimed to analyze water consumption and urban growth in 29 small towns in the State of Paraíba and investigate the relationship between water consumption and the spatial and temporal dynamics of the built environment in the urban areas of these municipalities. The methodological route basically took place in three stages. First, the trend analysis investigated the main water supply issues and urban expansion trends along with the driving forces that provided this growth from official databases and Citizen Science data obtained through the technical-participatory diagnoses elaborated by the Municipal Basic Sanitation Plans in the municipalities considered. The second stage refers to the analysis of patterns that sought to investigate relationships between the volume consumed and the urbanized area based on the examination of the selected variables (total population and supplied population, volume consumed and urbanized area), statistical methods and an index chosen from the review of the relevant literature, the Landscape Expansion Index (LEI) which has the purpose of providing information on dynamic space-time changes in urban growth patterns using multitemporal remote sensing. While the third stage, subsidized future scenarios of water demand and urban expansion using the historical series collected and studied. The results made it possible to identify that small cities have peculiar behaviors and characteristics that differ from each other and also from most large cities, however, all have supply problems such as intermittent service. As for urban growth, municipalities grow in different ways in the same time interval, with economic development being the main driver. Still, the greatest associations between the volume consumed and the urbanized area develop with the more linear and constant growth of both. Finally, no direct relationships were found, in the sample of cities analyzed, between oscillations in water consumption and the way they grow, or at least more information and more robust databases are needed for this relationship to be made explicit.