Sustainable water management under climate change in Southern Ecuador

Global warming and changes in the magnitude and spatial distribution of precipitation have already reduced water availability in many mountain areas, including the Andes Mountain range (IPCC, 2022). Globally, approximately 2.3 billion people are currently living in highly water-stressed areas (UN Water, 2021). By the end of the century, humid and semi-humid regions would decrease by 2.3 and 4.9 %, respectively (Tabari, 2020). These scenarios, together with population and water demand increase result in (i) the water demand risks to exceed the existing capacity of water supply and (ii) the wastewater treatment infrastructure fails to treat all polluted effluent water. As such, we proposed a project to the VLIR-UOS TEAM initiatives and got funded from 2022 to 2027. Our project aims to define the effect of climate change and increasing water demand projections and to propose and develop water management strategies that will secure the water supply of Andean cities in the future.

Our study site is Cuenca, a middle-size city located in southern Ecuador and, as many Andean cities, lacks of enough data (e.g. water scarcity is uncertain on its scale and periodicity all along the region) that allows informed decision making. In this sense, this project will reduce the uncertainty of global scenarios to propose adequate bottom up adaptation strategies that lead to better water resources management at a household and
regulatory level. The objectives of the proposed project are built under the Integrated Water Resource Management approach (IWRM) and water security. During a first phase, the project will provide climate and hydrological projections in the main catchments in Cuenca for the period 2020-2050 and during the second phase, we will provide water availability projections and water management adaptation plans built with citizens and decision makers.

A priority of this project is to enhance capacity building of local governments (e.g. Municipality of Cuenca, ETAPA EP which is the local water company), national institutions and Universities; this is key to achieve the transfer of knowledge and capacity building to the partner Universities and partner institutions. Citizens and other stakeholders are also key elements for the development of this initiative. Our ultimate goal is to implement the adaptation strategies proposed during the development of this project in the plans, policies and regulations for the city, working together with the citizens in three key axes: educommunicational activities, new or additional normative proposals, and infrastructure strategies. Furthermore, there is the need to propose and evaluate climate adaptation strategies applied to Andean cities (including outside Ecuador), and thus the methodology developed in the project will be made available to those cities.

The proposed project takes environment indirectly as one of the main objectives since the development of water management strategies considering climate change and increasing water demand, will directly contribute to the improvement and stabilization of the environment. Additionally, the project considers gender balance, with a female project director in Cuenca and a 40% female presence in co-promoters and team members.