The diversity of climates, topography, socioeconomic and cultural conditions, makes water management a complex task in Brazil. The challenges are huge, ranging from promoting water conservation and preservation in ecosystems of enormous environmental wealth, to helping to break the cycle of poverty which imprisons the populations of the Brazilian semi-arid, and includes pollution and flood controls in the urban areas of Brazil.

As water is at the same time a source of life and well-being, and an input to the productive process, the interests involved in managing the use and development of this resource are varied, diffuse and sometimes antagonistic. The implementation of integrated, decentralized and participatory management is the challenge to be faced if ambitious objectives are to be achieved.

This work represents a first approach to our water availability, to the uses of the resource in different parts of the country and its associated problems and challenges. It should be emphasized that this work does not represent an end in itself, but is part of a process. Through periodic evaluation, new data appears and information is updated so that decisions may be increasingly well-founded.

Brazil isn’t discouraged by the size of the task before it, and has been unrelenting in its search for and implementation of original solutions for old problems. The Water Law of 1997, the creation of the National Water Agency - ANA, and the building of the framework for the National Water Resources Management System are only some of these initiatives.