Depollution of the Tietê River: Government of SP announces BRL 5.6 billion – 03/31/2023 – Environment

The government of São Paulo announced this Friday (31) that it intends to invest BRL 5.6 billion by 2026 in actions to clean up the Tietê river. The move is the latest in more than three decades of pledges to clean up the state’s longest river.

Among the measures are the expansion of the basic sanitation network, desilting through public-private partnerships (PPPs), management of polders (areas with dikes), changes in the monitoring of water quality and recovery of fauna and flora. The initiatives must take place along the entire river, which is 1,100 km long.

Most of the resources, R$ 3.9 billion, should go towards sanitation actions, such as increasing sewage treatment capacity and expanding networks and trunk collectors.

In addition, of the total invested, R$ 800 million should come from the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank), in education and leisure actions, expansion of water monitoring and incentive to water transport.

Named Integra Tietê, the program also proposes that the Department of Water and Electric Energy be transformed into an agency, via a bill, and creates a forum composed of different government entities and members of civil society.

The plan presents a contracting model for sewage works, mirroring the Novo Rio Pinheiros program, from the previous management, which provides for remuneration based on the number of customers connected and only after improving the quality of the river’s water.

The most recent survey by Fundação SOS Mata Atlântica points out that, in 2022, of the nine points monitored in Tietê in different municipalities, four had poor quality water and five with fair classification. The Pinheiros River, the main tributary of the Tietê, was the only one whose water was evaluated as bad.

According to data from Sabesp, since the beginning of the Tietê Project, in 1992, US$ 3.4 billion (about R$ 17 billion at current exchange rates) has been invested in the program. The river’s pollution patch has decreased considerably, going from more than 500 km in length, in the 1990s, to the current 122 km. Despite this, in the last year it grew 43%.

Gustavo Veronesi, coordinator of the Observando os Rios program, from SOS Mata Atlântica, evaluates as positive the approach of the river as a whole, including stretches in the interior of the state, and the continuity of cleaning actions even with the change in the management of the state government .

Despite this, it points out gaps in the announced project. “The removal of silting from the river is important. But, more important than that, is taking care of the headwaters and the banks of the rivers to avoid silting up”, he says. “It is important to avoid erosive processes and this is not mentioned anywhere.”

This Friday morning, the Secretary for the Environment, Infrastructure and Logistics, Natália Resende, recognized that it is “a big challenge”. “Our intention is not to say that we are going to clean up in two, three or four years, because we know that this is a State policy,” she said.

The idea is for Integra Tietê to function as an umbrella, sheltering other ongoing initiatives, such as the Tietê Project and the Renasce Program.

“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We want to unite and leverage efforts through the joint action of the agencies and innovation”, evaluates Samanta Souza, undersecretary for Water Resources and Basic Sanitation of the state.

Veronesi sees depollution as an achievable objective. “It can be done. There’s investment, there’s resources, there’s financing. You just need to call the population more to think together and think about works that are not the ‘ash’, but also the ‘green’ infrastructure, of solutions based on nature. “

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}