Operationalizing Integrated Water Resource Management in Latin America: Insights from Application of the Freshwater Health Index

Abstract

Water crises in Latin America are more a consequence of poor management than resource scarcity. Addressing water management issues through better coordination, identification of problems and solutions, and agreement on common objectives to operationalize integrated water resources management (IWRM) could greatly improve water governance in the region. Composite indices have great potential to help overcome capacity and information challenges while supporting better IWRM. We applied one such index, the Freshwater Health Index (FHI) in three river basins in Latin America (Alto Mayo, Perú; Bogotá, Colombia; and Guandu, Brazil) to assess freshwater ecosystem vitality, ecosystem services, and the water governance system in place. The approach included convening management agencies, water utilities, planning authorities, local NGOs and industries, community groups and researchers to co-implement the FHI. The results provide detailed information on the ecological integrity of each basin and the sustainability of the ecosystem services being provided. All three basins show very low scores for governance and stakeholder engagement, thus improving both in the region should be a priority. The results also shed light on how the FHI framework can help inform decision-making to improve IWRM implementation by facilitating stakeholder engagement while contributing to coordination, identification of problems and solutions as well as agreement on common objectives. Because implementation of IWRM is part of the solution for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.5 (“By 2030, implement IWRM at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate”), our case studies can serve as examples to other Latin American countries to achieve SDG 6.5.

Integrating Ecosystem Services Into Water Resource Management: An Indicator-Based Approach

“…However, with few exceptions, such as the European Union's Water Framework Directive, decision-makers are at an early stage in developing and integrating ecosystem services into water resource management. In apply this indicator framework under FHI (basins from Asia, Africa, and Latin America) we have found that most stakeholders, whilst familiar with the concept of water ecosystem services, have considered them less often than the bio-physical or governance aspects of water management (Vollmer et al 2018;Bezerra et al 2021;Souter et al 2020;Wen et al 2020). Furthermore, the need for monitoring and management of water ecosystem services is not yet legislated in many jurisdictions (cf Liu et al 2019).…”

“…Given the uncertainty of the dataset used for the initial assessment, it was recognized that improving data on fish harvests should be prioritized, to inform monitoring and better calibrate any modeling efforts. Bezerra et al (2021) report that, when this framework was applied in Latin America, the juxtaposition of water quality regulation and disease regulation indicators fostered discussion of their linkages. Our framework supports better and more comprehensive management of freshwater systems (ecosystems included), by providing a starting point for scrutiny and discussion.…”

“…These three levels of data allow for an assessment to be made with varying levels of confidence or, conversely, under varying levels of uncertainty, which is largely dependent upon the type and quality of data available. For the FHI case studies in Asia (Vollmer et al 2018;Souter et al 2020) and Latin America (Bezerra et al 2021), most indicators could be calculated with data collected by basin authorities or with remotely sensed data. However, a few of these calculations relied on low-resolution data and were made with a relative paucity of data (F1).…”

“…The ability to calculate the indicator with readily available data increases its applicability and the likelihood that an ecosystem services-based approach will gain traction, as suitable data is often an initial hurdle to overcome. Recognizing and responding to these data gaps, which our assessment helps make explicit, can be a first step towards incorporating better ecosystem services information into management (Bezerra et al 2021).…”

“…Our need to evaluate water ecosystem services was driven by the application of the Freshwater Health Index's (FHI, Vollmer et al 2018) social-ecological framework, which was designed as an organizing structure (sensu Heink and Jax 2019) to help water resource managers assess ecosystem services at a basin scale. The FHI has been applied in more than eight basins in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to date (Vollmer et al 2018;Souter et al 2020;Wen et al 2020;Bezerra et al 2021), representing a range of spatial scales and datasets. The FHI frames freshwater basins as dynamic social-ecological networks, with linkages and feedbacks between human water needs, the ecological effects in the watershed of using freshwater, and the role of policy, decision-making and management in freshwater sustainability.…”