Determinação de um índice de desempenho do serviço de esgotamento sanitário para a cidade de Campina Grande-PB.

Abstract

One of the great current challenges is related to the planning of cities, which it is essential to achieve a sustainable development in them, without ignoring the management of water resources within the watershed. It is known that the uncontrolled growth of cities has been a major cause of water pollution, since these cities present a lack or an inefficiency of basic sanitation services. That been said, it is essential to evaluate the coverage and efficiency of basic sanitation components in order to seek improvements for the quality of life of the population and for the protection of the environment. The use of indicators emerges as an important tool to assess basic sanitation services, by considering not only the coverage of these services, but also their quality. Even though the indicators have the ability to summarize the system as a whole, in more complex situations, such as the ones involving all sanitation components, a single indicator is not capable of representing the entire system. Therefore, in these cases, a viable alternative is to aggregate various indicators in order to obtain an index. In this context, this study aims to determine a performance index of sewage service to the city of Campina Grande (IDSES_CG). To develop this index, there was a selection of nine indicators regarding the quality, the coverage, the operation and the maintenance of sewage services, whose choice was based on the data accessibility, the reliability of the source and the capability of them to adjust to the local reality. All the selected indicators were calculated, standardized, weighed and aggregated so that the general index (IDSES_CG) could be determined. Based on a nominal scale, the situation involving the sewage service in the city was evaluated and then classified as regular. This research also contemplated a detailed study including some of the quality indicators in order to identify the most problematic areas regarding the sanitary sewage service in Campina Grande.