Our country lives a adverse weather situation and one worrying water crisisas shared by National Metereological Service and the National Water Comission.
The data is more than revealing, during the first quarter of 2024, the 58% of the national territory was covered by droughtWhile in the same period in 2023 was 47%.
He problem has intensified in various regions of the country, where large areas went from moderate to severe drought and from extreme to exceptional.
The droughts They are categorized into four levels: moderate, severe, extreme and exceptionalthis year extreme and exceptional droughts have been increasing, which has affected states such as Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Querétaro, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí, other entities are also suffering severe and moderate droughts.
The panorama of the water crisis is alarmingAs of May 2024, the 210 main dams in Mexico are at 41% of their capacity, storing around 51.8 billion cubic meters of water.
In Sinaloa, the 11 dams record a storage of 1,855 million cubic meters of water, 11.9 percent of their conservation capacity.
Sandra Guido, director of the civil association Conselva, an organization that has operated for 16 years mainly in the south of the state, reveals the seriousness of the situation we are experiencing, stating that Sinaloa suffers from 70% of water stress according to reports from the organization. Word Sources Institute, (water stress is when the demand for water is higher than the quantity available during a given period or when its use is restricted by its low quality).
For 20 years, analyzes of climate scenarios have been carried out for the state, and in them there are no stable scenarios in rainfall and temperatures, rainfall is being reduced, it is not raining as it used to before.
The problem of water scarcity is worrying, the patterns and volumes of rainfall have been reducing, therefore the water levels in the dams have not recovered, contradictory is that more water continues to be spent and less is received, argues Guido. .
And if we add to this the increase in temperatures, the problem has become more serious in recent years. For Sinaloa, one degree Celsius more than the historical average has been recorded. The estimate is that in 80 years, 5 degrees Celsius more have been predicted. which will occur in the mountain areas where the dams are.
Water is a scarce and finite resource, we Sinaloans have become accustomed to the fact that if we have 11 dams in the state we will have water forever, as if the dams produced water, the reality is that the water comes from the basins, from rainwater. that falls into them, they form streams and fall into a river, if you have sick and degraded basins, water will not be captured, even if it rains, there are healthy basins with great vegetation and healthy soils which are sponges that capture and absorb water for the rivers, but there are others that don’t.
Organizations like Conselva are worthy of recognition and support from the three levels of government, they have carried out studies in 11 sub-basins in the south of Sinaloa, almost 30% of the total, there are 2 million 100 thousand hectares, it indicates which micro-basins are producing water which must be protected by taking care of them from deforestation by implementing protected natural areas.
Conselva proposes a citizen water agenda, it has been proposing it since its foundation, where society, government, businessmen and citizens participate coordinated, time has run out and so has water.
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