When you consider the garbage disposed of by the largest industrial park in the State of Rio de Janeiro, the waste produced by million residents of the 16 municipalities through which the rivers that flow into Guanabara Bay passes and the mooring of hundreds of ships, the result is tragic: serious ecosystem imbalance in the bay and human populations living in alarming unhealthy conditions over all itssub-basins.

In order to promote a participatory water management and reduce the social and environmental inequities of these territories, civil society organizations are building a Social Center of the Sub-basin of Cunha Canal - one of the most degraded sub-basins of Guanabara Bay. The project aims to bring together researchers and civil society organizations, converging scientific and popular knowledge to change the environmental injustice scenario in the sub-basin. The President of Fiocruz and the Vice President of Environment, Health Care and Promotion (VPPAPS) of the Foundation are among the supporters of the project, in a social cooperation.
 
The sub-basin of Cunha Canal is cut by 44 slums – a counting dated 2006, according to a study made by the Institute of Scientific and Technological Information and Communication on Health (Icict/Fiocruz).The space collects the waters from the rivers that rise in Serra dos Pretos Forros, the Forest Region of Tijuca and the Forest Region of Serra da Misericordia, and go through densely populated areas such as Manguinhos, Cascadura, Piedade, Lins de Vasconcelos, Engenho de Dentro, Inhaúma, Jacaré, among others.
 
The center, which aims at thinking about developing more participatory and effective environmental policies for this space, is an initiative of the Articulation Group of the Peoples of the Sub-basin of Canal Cunha, bringing together community-based actors and social movements. The purpose of the center was announced during the 4th Meeting of the Rivers (Encontro dos Rios) - The Way of Water, organized by the group in September, at the auditorium of the Museum of Life, at Fiocruz.
 
Geographer and militant Ernesto Imbroisi, one of those responsible for the design and development of the initiative, explains that its conceptual design allows academic institutions to get closer to the real demands of local people." The idea is that research can be an instrument of social transformation in the hands of social and community-based organizations," said him. "A technical report on water quality of a river passing through a slum of thesub-basin, for example, can be used as a complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office; if any violation is found, it may encourage some real structural policy in the Guanabara Bay Watershed Committee."
 
According to environmentalist Sérgio Ricardo, a founding member of Viva Baia Movement and one of the project supporters, "the creation of the Cunha Center and the other two centers that are emerging at the same time [the Guanabara Bay Fishing Center and the Geographic and Historical Center of Uerj – São Gonçalo], arise in a context of clear failure of the Depollution Program of Guanabara Bay." He points out that “R$ 10 billion of loans in huge works, import of European waste recycling plants were spent - none of them in operation, most disassembled and rusting."
 
According to Sergio Ricardo, a major cause of the failure of the program was precisely the fact that research centers have not been heard on its formulation. “One of the major criticisms that is made against depollution project was first the lack of planning, and secondly, the lack of popular participation. Researchers, some studying the bay for decades, such as Elmo Amador, were not heard either”, he said.
 

How the project works

The Center of the Sub-basin of Cunha Canal will work on four areas: research (production of knowledge by research centers and the academy from the shared development and the action research method – an investigative and interactive process between researchers and the population to find possible solutions to the problems detected in reality; education (training and education processes in the territories, qualifying new social actors working on the health and environment theme); management (potentiate the actions of social organizations and the member institutions of the Center in the management of water from the Guanabara Bay Watershed Committee) and diffusion (spread knowledge, information and social technologies produced by partners articulated in the center and other institutions and social organizations).
 
Projects that can provide support and direction to the actions taken by the center will be designed from these lines of action. One of them involves the mapping of the source of the sub-basin of Cunha canal for future environmental remediation activity.
 
According to Ernesto Imbroisi, the Centre shall develop its actions based on the water way and as a methodological assumption. "What does that mean? That the implemented initiatives seek to go through river ways, from upstream to downstream, in source-base level direction" he explained. "The choice of this approach is to ensure that any improvement in environmental conditions of the sub-basin of Cunha canal is continuous and permanent, directly causing the reduction of pollution of Guanabara Bay."
 
Read in full.
 
Source: Manguinhos Journal – Article written by Luiza Gomes