Índice de Pobreza Hídrica (IPH) aplicado a municípios dos sertões dos Inhamuns no semiárido do Ceará - Brasil

Abstract

Communities and the environment are elements of a complex system and need an efficient management of natural resources and especially water, to wildlife and soils are preserved and local development is achieved in a sustainable and lasting. The strategic management of water and natural resources requires the search for instruments that will contribute to the sustainability of ecosystems. The semi-arid areas are more susceptible to desertification processes and therefore deserve special attention. The indicators have been quite effective to represent reality, capable of producing current and future scenarios. Thus the researchers made use of new technologies and extensive literature review to treat the information in an integrated, while taking into account the particularities of each site in order to be able to support managers in appropriate management of natural resources. The binomial water-poverty has imposed the need for construction of multivariate analytical tools for integrated view of the diversity of elements involved in this process. The Water Poverty Index (HPI) is a holistic indicator, which enables the environmental management from the knowledge of the degree of water scarcity and its effects on society, developed by the group of the Oxford Centre for Water Research (OCWR), UK ( 2000) and applied to more than 140 countries. Our goal is to calculate this indicator and verify its applicability in actions related to poverty and environmental degradation in semi-arid region of Ceará