Environmental flows and integrated water resources management in Colombia

In Colombia, around 70% of the energy is from hydropower source and most of its associated hydraulic infrastructure is located in the macro-basin of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers. These projects are generating a drainage network fragmentation and a substantial alteration in natural regimes of both flow and sediment, which is having negative impacts on freshwater ecosystems and their ecosystem services. Nowadays, there is a methodology related to environmental flows, proposed in 2018 by the Colombian Ministry of Environmental and Sustainable Development (not adopted as a regulation), which integrates two sets of stakeholders: environmental authorities for integrated water resources management at regional scale and holders of new projects with high impact on the natural flow regime of rivers. Since it is only a non-binding methodological proposal, there are no known practical applications to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of reduction of environmental impacts, social conflicts, and water governance. In this sense, we propose a step forward in the analysis of the effects of its application in rivers with available hydrological data and under natural regime conditions through a taylor-made computer model (HeCCA 1.0) which is composed of the most important methods contemplated in the above-mentioned methodology.

HeCCA 1.0 allows determining the percentage of monthly use of a river without compromising its ecosystem function, based on it, river discharge data of 15 different watersheds located throughout the entire country were used. In this test, a range of drainage areas (180 to 73000 km²) was covered located between 25 and 2993 meters above sea level. The systems belong to different seasonal behaviors depending on the geographical location (monomodal or bimodal). For the monomodal regime, utilization percentages were obtained between the 61%8 and 77%29; and for bimodal regimen between 14% and 49%32.

These results depend on the geographical location of the basin, the watershed size, if it is related to the runoff seasonality along the year in the different catchment areas of the country. The taylor-made computer model provides stakeholders a holistic overview of the water availability and management, giving quantitative tools for an optimal development of water governance in the region.