Water and Residue Management & Safety in the face of climate change
The theme involves staffs of graduate programs with grades 7 and 5 according to the last CAPES’s assessment, which confers the proper degree of international and national excellence to the proposal. The international insertion of the researches on the theme is proved by the several collaborations, agreements, bilateral projects and practices at foreign universities and high-impact international conferences, according to the description of the projects involved on the theme. It is worth to highlight the expressive raising of foreign funds as a counterpart to the projects on this theme. In support to the choice of the theme, it is also worth mentioning that the management of water resources is, for obvious reasons, one of the strategic points of the public policies in Ceará and in the Northeast region as a whole. For this reason, UFC has historically considered the area of water resources as central in its activities of research and graduate studies by promoting several cooperations with government and international agencies. One of the innovative aspects of the projects composing the theme in issue is the interdisciplinary articulation between Civil Engineering/Water Resources, Sociology, Tropical Marine Sciences and Biotechnology of Natural Resources. The related projects cover a wide spectrum of topics in an integrated way, since the mapping of variability and climate risk, adaptive management of water infrastructure and governance of the water resource systems to sociological approaches concerning the conflicts for the use of water, as well as the analysis of economic aspects related to the allocation or water supply costs. Another aspect of the proposal aims at offering solutions in the process of complete treatment of solid urban waste, with efficiency and low cost of biodigestion operation. Also, with respect to the issue of water scarcity in the context of climate change, the utilization of photocatalytic processes in eutrophicated reservoirs is proposed, a well-succeeded process in laboratory which proposes to be replicated in real scale. These complementary dimensions of the project, with proposals of intervention in the causes and effects of climate change on water resources, demonstrate the unit of purposes and the cohesion of the lines of research on the theme. Great projects executed by the staff (the project ADAPTA CNPq-UFC-Columbia-Georgia) and with financial counterparts of the foreign partners, set the theme synergistically in compliance with the mission, tradition and competence of the institution in water resources.
