Essential to life, water is also a scarce resource, influencing people’s health both in terms of quality and availability. Given its importance, it is easy to see that water shortages jeopardise socio-economic development, energy and food production, the construction of healthy ecosystems and the survival of the human species.
Unfortunately, this resource will not continue to be available to the population in the way we have known until now. According to the Guimarães Municipal Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation, climate projections for the municipality point, among other changes, to a potential decrease in total annual precipitation and to a potential increase in temperatures, intensifying the occurrence of hotter and drier summers and, also, to an increase in the frequency of heat waves and intense or very intense precipitation events.
Based on this diagnosis, and operating through a Governance Ecosystem, several Guimarães institutions cooperated in the development and implementation of a pilot project in one of Guimarães Municipal Swimming Pools: the Complexo de Piscinas de Guimarães. Thus, this pilot results from a partnership between Guimarães City Hall, Tempo Livre, Laboratório da Paisagem, Vimágua and VITRUS. This project aims to implement measures for the reuse of water that is not in its initial conditions, but can be used in other activities. Thus, in an initial phase, and through the installation of an appropriate system, the pool water usually rejected (cleaning of filters and regeneration) is stored. Subsequently, this water is used for non-potable purposes, namely for cleaning streets in the Historic Centre of Guimarães.