Resilience Dispatch #35: A Hopeful Story About Water

INTRODUCTION: A HOPEFUL STORY ABOUT WATER

Some of the biggest news stories recently have revolved around water. Often too much water, in the form of catastrophic flooding, sometimes too little in the form of droughts. Water is “the face of climate change,” the most tangible area where people tend to initially see and feel its impacts, as weather patterns and water availability become increasingly irregular.

I want to kick off this Resilience Dispatch by sharing a more encouraging story about water: one about how transformational change for resilience is possible—through partnerships and persistence.

Last month, Peru’s National Water Authority approved a new protocol for how water rights are assigned. Historically, 70 percent of water rights went to men in Peru, limiting women’s access to water resources and shutting them out from decision-making spaces. This new protocol ensures that for water rights assigned to a person who is married or with a long-term partner, both names are included on the right. This means that more women will have access to water rights and be able to participate in spaces like water councils, boards, and committees that decide how water is managed, including how nature is part of that management.

This transformational shift is a direct result of our work with Peruvian institutions to increase gender equality in water management—a key ingredient for increasing resilience—through the Natural Infrastructure for Water Security (NIWS) project.

Through the NIWS project, supported by USAID and Canada, Forest Trends and our partners have been working since 2017 to scale up investments in projects that use nature to strengthen water security and climate resilience in Peru. Our new publication, Journey towards Water Security, shares the main results of this collaborative work to date, which includes developing a portfolio of over 80 natural infrastructure projects (like this one) valued at over US$370 million with local funders and over 240 local communities.

While the NIWS project’s journey has many results to share, we think one of the most important lessons is how those results were achieved: through relationships, between institutions that have not worked together, sectors that have been siloed, and communities that have not been connected in Peru.

Peru’s new water rights protocol, for example, was the result of building relationships with ten different leaders of Peru’s National Water Authority over the past six years. We achieve impact by supporting champions of nature-based solutions, institutional change, and technical capacity, while remaining nimble enough to act on windows of opportunity in Peru’s rapidly changing political environment. Peru offers some important lessons for other countries trying to make their water and infrastructure sectors more resilient in these times of climate and political instability.

In January, we celebrated the extension of NIWS through 2027 with USAID, Canada, and our Peruvian partners. Today, we celebrate women in Peru having the rights they need to play their vital role in water and climate resilience in Peru.

Best,

Michael

A new report by the Natural Infrastructure for Water Security project, Journey towards Water Security, summarizes the impressive accomplishments of the project and its partners from 2017 through September 2023. It outlines NIWS’ unique approach that has helped Peru reach over US$370 million in investments in natural infrastructure. A few main takeaways are below.

A LOOK AT HOW WOMEN ARE TRANSFORMING WATER MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP IN PERU 

Twenty-three women leaders in water governance from 12 Peruvian regions recently gathered in Arequipa, Peru for a meeting on “Women Transforming Water Management,” organized by Forest Trends with Peruvian partners CEDEPAS Norte, Desco, Descosur, Chaski Q’enti, and CONDESAN, and with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Canada, and the D. N. Batten Foundation. A video from the event is below.

At nearly 14,000 feet above sea level in the mountains of southern Peru, people in the San Juan de Tarucani district in the Arequipa region are facing a water crisis. Wetlands and lagoons in the area are usually replenished during the rainy season (December through March), but in the face of lower rainfall associated with climate change, these critical water sources are drying up. And this doesn’t only affect people in San Juan de Tarucani; the community is near the head of the Chili River, which supplies drinking water to the over one million inhabitants of the city of Arequipa.

While water scarcity can be a source of division, it can also be an opportunity to come together. Some regions in Peru have been discovering the power of water as a way to unite and show up to the problem-solving table a little differently. Seeing water as a collective responsibility, rather than simply a “water utility problem,” opens the door for diverse perspectives and buy-in from other sectors – collaborations every country will need to navigate water crises in a changing climate. With support from Forest Trends and our partners, people in the Arequipa region were supported to build such a coalition and recognize their shared dependence on a dwindling resource.