Abstract
This paper reviews the serious social, economic and environmental problems in the watersheds on whose freshwater Greater São Paulo’s enterprises and 18 million inhabitants depend. These problems include the growing concentration of illegal settlements in the watersheds and the fact that environmental legislation in the 1970s actually increased the problem. A large and growing proportion of the low-income population has come to live in the watersheds, in settlements with poor living conditions and high levels of violence. This paper describes the new measures taken during the 1990s to address watershed protection and the social and economic problems of those who live there; also, the way in which these measures are structured to bring together the efforts of the state government, the municipal authorities and civil society.