A community in Colombia facing deforestation and risks to their water supply are working with international researchers to assess those risks.
Over two billion people live in a country with water scarcity and half of the world’s population could be facing water scarcity as early as 2025 and by 2040, roughly a quarter of children worldwide could be living in areas of extremely high water stress, according to statistics from UNICEF.
Carolina Montoya Pachongo, a research fellow Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub at the University of Leeds, is leading a project to analyse water-insecurity risks in river basins, starting in Colombia.
The residents of the southern Colombian municipality of Cajibo, Cauca have been forced to rely on firewood and charcoal as an economic activity, leading to localized deforestation.
For the first time, the water risk from this situation is being assessed by Montoya Pachongo and her collaborators from the Universidad del Cauca using a new approach dubbed MUISKA by the researchers.
“For risk analysis, it is also crucial to include relevant parties in the research to produce a valid analysis,” Montoya Pachongo says, “We did this in Cajibío; participants identified their water-insecurity conditions and their systemic connections with root causes and consequences, prioritized several risks to be fully assessed, and identified preliminary actions to manage some risks.”
In 2023, the researchers held workshops in Cajibío and the plan is to share the results of the water security assessment with the locals in 2024 via established Whatsapp groups.
Montoya Pachongo explains that interdisciplinary work is key to making a global impact on water security with “particular emphasis on poor countries, which are the most vulnerable to global warming” and other climate hazards.
“Our planet is closely interconnected, and actions happening in one part can affect another faraway area,” she says, “We need to use all our resources (scientific, local, and indigenous knowledge and expertise; languages; values and culture) and work closely with relevant parties and decision-makers to promote sustainable solutions to global problems with regional and local consequences.”
Passion For Water in Colombia
Montoya Pachongo was born and raised in the southern Colombian city of Cali and explains that she didn’t have any scientific or engineering role-models growing up.
“My high school was for only girls and focused on teaching us how to be secretaries, so I learned to type, shorthand, bookkeeping, accounting, commerce,” she says, adding that she was unaware of the gender gap in engineering but no-one in her family discouraged her from studying engineering.
Montoya Pachongo says she was very fortunate that her friends banded together to get her the money to register for her undergraduate engineering course and then graduated as a sanitary engineer in 2005.
Montoya Pachongo explains that at first, she thought drinking water wasn’t an attractive area of study because “everything was already done,” but thanks to inspiration from her professors Patricia Torres and Camilo Cruz, she discovered new research questions and tools to work in the water industry.
“I think it is essential for scientists from poor countries to investigate the solutions to global challenges, together with researchers from more developed countries, because of the great synergy that all perspectives and resources can create to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to global problems,” she says, “It is fundamental that Latin America also strengthens its science and innovation systems by providing more access to increased funds, more opportunities to collaborate with researchers from this region, and better scientific education to define our research agenda and apply diverse approaches beyond Western models.”
AI For Water Risk Argentina
Elsewhere in Latin America, an Argentinian medical doctor has returned to his home country to use AI and remote sensing to provide a snapshot of the risk water-related disasters.
Nicolas Wertheimer M.D., who was also named in Forbes Argentina’s 30 Promesas Forbes in 2019, says the project was born out of his personal experiences and observations in local communities in Argentina.
“My medical journey made me want to return to Latin America and focus on one of the most critical issues affecting the region and the second leading cause of death for children under 5 years old… waterborne diseases,” he says, adding that it became clear that relying solely on antibiotics and anti-parasite medications was insufficient.
Wertheimer says that Waterplan, the start-up he co-founded, was born to show organizations the business case for mitigating water disasters, incentivizing them to save water, abate water pollution and conserve watersheds.
“We recognized the need to train people and mobilize collective action to improve water access and hygiene in local and vulnerable communities.
