Ecuadoran Cities Protecting Water
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Government
Stop that Cow: When Ecuadoran Cities Organize to Protect Water Supplies
Arturo Quevedo, the engineer responsible for the watershed protection program forLoja, Ecuador'smunicipal water agency, has a kind demeanor. His slightly crooked front teeth are prominent beneath his moustache as he waxes ebullient about clean water percolating through forested slopes, coursing through pipes, and hydrating Loja's children. But don't let the gentle, nature-lover exterior fool you. As tender as he is with the landscape, he is equally fierce in sniffing out water-polluting scum.
In the 1990s Loja's mayor, José Reyes Jaramillo, faced a city administrator's nightmare - a diminishing and polluted water supply. This same nightmare haunts cities around the world as climate change makes water cycles unpredictable. While 3.8 billion people get their drinking water from a piped connection, many consumers don't trust the water. Millions of poor families in megacities like Mexico City, for example, pay a water bill but nevertheless purchase expensive bottled water as insurance against diarrhea and other water-borne diseases.
Mayor Jaramillo's hunch was that the water problem lay upstream, where swelling cattle herds pounded the earth into cement and abundant manure was a vector for microbes. He turned to Arturo Quevedo, who not only had a reputation for water engineering, but for knowing a thing or two about managing community problems.
SENAGUAis Ecuador's new water regulatory agency. It was created shortly after Ecuador's 2009 constitution affirmed both the human right to water andnature's right to water. Those rights are highly popular among Ecuador's citizens, but not surprisingly also threaten vested interests. The Fondo Regional de Agua (FORAGUA) recently organized a watershed conference entitled, "New Challenges in Water Management" at the Private Technical University of Loja. Juan Pablo Martinez, Sub-Secretary of Santiago for SENAGUA, summed up the agency's work in few words, "Managing water is managing conflicts." Heads nodded in knowing agreement. Arturo was one of them.
"I tromped up ravines and gullies to find the headwaters of the city's water," Arturo said. "I inventoried water sources and contaminants." He recorded how land was used — did it have forest cover, was it over-grazed? He overlaid use and geographical features. "Back then," he explained, "looking at micro-watersheds and land use together was a new way of seeing." In many places, it still is.
Arturo pleaded with city hall to buy 500 hectares, a hillside that acts as one of many natural filters for the city's water. Planners these days refer to relying on natural systems as‘green' infrastructure (in contrast to "gray" infrastructuresuch as a water filtration plant). "Some people criticized me, but I said, look, we don't have regulations on land use, no ordinances." From Arturo's point of view, the best path to clean drinking water without requiring a lot of chemical treatment was for the city to acquire property and fence out cattle. To this day, Arturo remains skeptical about cutting deals with landowners. "You help them reforest and they're happy with the saplings. But when the trees mature, they screw the program and chop them down for sale."
A researcher at the watershed conference,Leander Raes, took a slightly different approach, debating Arturo. While his research found that purchasing land for conservation does indeed improve water quality, it doesn't do much to alleviate rural poverty.
The long-term solution, Raes suggested, is to provide an economic boost to small farmers while steering them towards more environmentally-friendly practices - through what are called in present day lingo,payments for environmental services. Others argue that there's no solution to watershed health in cattle country without making peace with ranchers.Agro-forestry techniques on grazing landsare gaining traction throughout Latin America. Municipally-owned parcels, Raes said, can be a helpful complement but don't resolve how to incentivize farmers and ranchers to shift away from harmful land and water use.
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