Central America hashes out agenda for use of water
SAN SALVADOR: The countries of Central America are striving to define a plan to promote the sustainable use of water, a crucial need in a region that is already suffering the impacts of climate change.
This effort has materialised in Central America’s Water Agenda, the draft of which was agreed in November, in Tegucigalpa, by the governments of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, along with the Spanish- speaking Caribbean nation the Dominican Republic.
These countries form part of the Central American Integration System ( SICA), the economic and political organisation of Central American countries, since December 1991, where they are working to address the issue of water with a regional and sustainable perspective.
“In the region there has been no political instrument to establish a common agenda on water issues, which is why this effort has been made: To generate a space for coordination among the environment ministers, who are responsible for the management of water.” – Fabiola Tábora
The document is expected to be approved at a regional meeting to be held in February in Santo Domingo, according to Central American officials and experts interviewed by IPS.
“We saw that it was convenient for us to work on a plan, a sort of agenda, that would give expression to the issue of the integral management of the resource,” Salvador Nieto, executive director of the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD), told IPS.
This is the SICA agency made up of the environment ministers of the eight countries, focused on co- ordinating efforts to collectively preserve the region’s ecosystems. And water is a vitally important issue for the 50.6 million Central Americans, especially farmers who have lost their crops due to a lack or excess of rainfall, as a result of climate change.
“All the studies recognise the vulnerability of the region, and point out that the most severe impacts of climate change for Central America will be because of the water issue,” Nieto added.
He said that although reports show that there will be intense storms, they also warn that in the medium term the main problem will be a shortage of water throughout the region.
In 2014, drought caused some 650 million dollars in losses in agriculture, hydroelectric power generation and drinking water, according to the study Situation of Water Resources in Central America:
Towards Integrated Management, published in March by the Global Water Partnership (GWP).
However, the region has good water availability, because Central American countries use less than 10 per cent of their available resources, points out the August edition of Entre- aguas, a report by the regional office of the GWP, an international network of organisations involved in the question of the management of water resources.
The problem, the report says, is the irregular temporal and geographical distribution of precipitation, and the scarce mechanisms of water storage and regulation. That limits an optimal and efficient use of water, which leads to basins with problems of water scarcity in the dry season.
The GWP report adds that, due to the high climate variability associated with climate change, the concentration of rainfall in certain regions or in certain periods and droughts in others, affects the quantity and quality of water available. — IPS