The Brazilian National Water Agency - ANA

   The Brazilian National Water Agency, ANA, was created in July 2000 with the mandate to enforce the National Policy on Water Resources, NPWR, passed by Parliament in 1997. This new institutional arrangement was a response to the increasing demands over scarce water resources by conflicting uses, such as agriculture, industry, urban and recreational uses. Amongst ANA's attributions is the planning and management of the national water resources, while being subject to the principles, guidelines and instruments defined by the National Policy on Water Resources.
 
  ANA is an executive branch from the Ministry of Environment. It is managed by a Board of Directors and it has administrative and financial autonomy to regulate the multiple water uses. This autonomy aims at ensuring the highest possible efficiency in public and private water provision. Meeting the growing needs of different sectors and mediating conflicts over its use, while ensuring the environmental sustainability of water resources, requires a modern and efficient water management approach, which the 1934 Brazilian Water Code could no longer provide. In this context, the National Water Resources Management System was put in place under ANA's general coordination.

  The ever-increasing water demands from the urban, industrial and agricultural sectors are a source of permanent potential conflicts in most countries of the world, Brazil being no exception to the rule. These conflicts are rooted on the frequent mismatch between availability and demand over water resources, which adds up to the troubling advance of environmental degradation in our rivers and lakes. Brazil is currently addressing this most serious issue through the enforcement of an innovative, modern legal instrument, the 1997 Law N° 9,433. This Act established the National Water Resources Policy and created the National Water Resources Management System.

  Appart from being responsible for the implementation of the National Water Policy ANA must enforce the 1977 Water Law, which regulates the use of water resources in Brazil.

  Brazil's legal framework on water resources was approved in early 1997 (Law 9,433/1997), under strong influence of the French water resources model, a rather ambitious river management model. Under this legal framework the River Basin Committes are endowed with important attributions on the decision of assigning priorities on the multiple uses competing for scarce water resources at the river basin level throughout the whole country.

  Currently, Brazil counts with 6 national level River Basin Committees and approximately 80 state level Committees. River Basing Agencies are on the process of being created. It is the National Water Agency's mission to provide technical support on the creation of such Committees and Agencies.

  While creating the technical conditions to enforce the Water Law, ANA must contribute to solve two critical national problems: i) prolonged drought, particularly in the North-East Region, which requires being addressed not only through increasing the water offer, but requires demand management, including the adoption of water quota rules; and ii) river pollution, when pollution abatement needs to be addressed within a river basin that includes more than one Federal State.