Collaborative research to support water security and sustainable development in Colombia

Newcastle University is forging partnerships with international and UK academics and water-based practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders to address global concerns which will be discussed during COP26 in Glasgow.

Maggie Roe, Diana Marcela Ruiz Ordonez, Helen Underhill, Miguel R. Peña-Varón

Newcastle University

As the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) makes clear, water security is essential to human life, food and energy security, health and wellbeing, and economic prosperity. Yet, nearly 80% of the world’s population live in areas where water security is thwarted by pressures such as climate change, conflict, ecosystem damage, extreme weather, gender inequalities, land degradation, over-abstraction, pollution, poor governance, and uncontrolled urbanisation. In response to this urgent need, the Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub(https://www.watersecurityhub. org/) at Newcastle University was initiated in 2019 as a five-year project with the goal of investigating how water security could be improved for a more resilient future.

The Hub is a significant international and interdisciplinary endeavour focused on place-based research in four countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, India, and Malaysia. Each country faces different development transitions that illustrate the global challenges to sustainable water security. Interdisciplinarity is key to this project, which emphasises the significance of sociocultural factors and participatory research methods alongside the work of hydrologists, engineers, and scholars of water governance. With over 100 staff from 12 institutions, including early career researchers, established academics, and a team of operational staff, the Hub also draws together community groups and local charities, global nonprofits, government ministries, regional and local environmental authorities, regional and municipal governments, and utilities’ companies.

Newcastle University acts as the host institution for this project, backed by UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund. Country teams, known as ‘Collaboratories’, focus on an area of the landscape defined by hydrological boundaries of selected river basins.

Valuation of water in the landscape

The research across the Hub is based on an interdisciplinary approach rooted in building a better understanding of the socioecological dynamics of the landscape of each country. The approach considers the wider context within which the flow of water, people, ideas, and interventions takes place. Particularly significant is the adoption of an analytical method based on recognising and understanding the various systems in the landscape and considering how these can be transformed for greater sustainability. This aims to recognise the complex links between mitigating the impacts of climate change, such as drought and flooding, and developing new solutions for water management and the treatment of wastewater. A range of research methods are used, including community-based coproduction tools to find solutions for water sustainability at the water basin level. This aims to reveal the voices of those currently marginalised from decision making in order to develop expressions of water values that can inform more equitable water management and governance. Working towards water sovereignty for marginalised communities depends on recognising plural values of water, and the development of holistic, creative, participatory methodologies. This approach is identifying the ‘hydrosocial territories’ at various scales. The hydrosocial cycle is a concept related to the hydrologic cycle. However, while the hydrologic cycle separates water from its social context, the hydrosocial cycle is a way of thinking about water’s social and political nature and is particularly useful as an analytical tool to understand the problems of injustice and unfair access to water resources for the most vulnerable social groups.

Upper Cauca River Basin (UCRB) Case Study

Through a series of PhD projects in collaboration with stakeholders, the research examines the following areas of work:

– Indigenous and Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) related to water management

– The links between water, food and land sovereignty

– The development of theories related to plural values

– Participatory zoning of hydrological ecosystems services within areas of environmental significance

– Using a ‘systems approach’ to integrating understandings of domestic water use practices

– A political ecology of water use; environmental justice and values

– Armed conflict and the environment

– The impact on water use of land use and the cultivation of monocrops such as sugar cane.

Furthermore, the application of analytical tools based on Materials Flow Analysis (MFA) and Social Metabolism will allow for the appraisal of sustainability indicators such as the water footprint and carbon footprint in the hydrosocial territories under study.

The research is informing the development of an integrative approach for a ‘waterscapes’ perspective based on hydrosocial thinking. Whereas existing research and concepts around waterscapes has mostly focused on the politics and governance of water, the aim here is to think more holistically about the tangible physical environment and processes, the politics that surround water, and its sociocultural characteristics. These characteristics include the meanings, traditions, associations and cultural practices embedded within the landscape which are essential to a full appreciation of the whole water environment.

The Colombian team takes the landscape of the Upper Cauca River as their case study. As Colombia recovers from long-term conflict and the resulting complex governance, the Colombian Collaboratory is working to help recover the water regulation services in the area; implement agroecological systems for equitable water management and increased resilience to extreme climatic events; and to integrate planning tools within and across government. The complexity of the issues related to water security and sustainability in the Upper Cauca River Basin (UCRB) has (currently and in the past) exacerbated the conflicts between communities, which have a long-held understanding of the need to work with natural processes, and stakeholder institutions which approach water management in more technical terms in order to control the processes.

The situation on the ground is complex, and while the landscape is rich, the necessary transformation of the UCRB needs to address land use conflicts derived from socioeconomic processes that encourage intensive farming and other productive activities over communities’ needs for water. This impacts vulnerable ecosystems when poor farmers are displaced into areas such as the paramos and the Andean Forest. Unplanned urban expansion increasingly fragments the

landscape and impacts hydrological processes while pollution that comes from agro-industrial and domestic processes limits the clean water supply for both communities and healthy ecosystems downstream. Taking a landscape – or waterscape – perspective is helpful as it recognises the interactivity of human and natural systems, and that they are complex, dynamic systems which provide a high degree of uncertainty in developing management processes.

Paramo ecosystem and Laguna San Rafael, in the national natural park Puracé, a protected area for conservation.

Source: Martínez J.2018

In the process of the research, the team recognises the need to integrate different views and knowledge around water dynamics for management. This is a process that connects to the local socioecological context, the needs of the communities, and the possibilities to integrate planning tools within and across government.

In the next three years the aim is to generate synergies between institutions and communities to make water management processes more dynamic and responsive to community needs. An important lesson learned from the pandemic is the need to develop a better understanding of the connectedness of rural and urban environments, so that if those providing food and managing the land for clean water upstream are unable to do so, downstream cities will run short of both. In particular, it is important to develop co-responsibility on the part of water users in urban areas to help improve the quality of life and wellbeing of rural communities. Researchers are helping to develop the implementation of sustainable water security strategies and the development of new agroecological production processes, management and conservation actions in areas of hydrological importance and/or socioecological vulnerability.

Conclusions

The Water Hub is an example of how Newcastle University has forged partnerships with international and UK academics and water-based practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders to address the global concerns which will be discussed during COP26. The University is working with early career researchers to enable the next generation of practitioners and researchers to play a significant part in tackling water security and the climate emergency. Over the last two years, the Water Hub has established the four Collaboratories that provide a co-creative stakeholder engagement process for solving complex problems. These formed around the shared principle of being inclusive and open to all stakeholders to meet on a basis of mutual respect, to question, discuss, and construct new interdisciplinary ideas to resolve water security issues. Each has adapted to its local landscape and development context, ambitions and cultures. The University is taking a number of initiatives related to climate change through teaching as well as research projects internationally and in the UK. An important development is the establishment of multidisciplinary research centres including a Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Landscape co-directed by Maggie Roe. The Landscape Centre will link disciplines and build on existing partnerships to reach out and both instigate and respond to novel areas of future research.

San Francisco river canyon, upper Cauca river basin, department of Cauca.

Source: Martínez J.2018

Small farmers in Las Piedras River basin, Department of Cauca, in the community work of planting with agroecological practices for food sovereignty.

Source: ASOCAMPO 2019.

Four researchers working on the project reflect on their experiences

Miguel

“As Co-Primary Investigator for the Colombian Collaboratory, it is both a challenge and privilege to help put into practice our team’s integrated approach to the characterisation and understanding of the waterscape of the UCRB. This challenges us to develop from working in a multidisciplinary academic context into a collaborative transdisciplinary approach with academics, stakeholders and communities outside academia. Using our combined knowledge, know-how, experience and discussions will yield a vision of the socio-ecological transitions required to develop future water security in our study area. We view this as a dynamic co-adaptive process, where robust discussions will be the basis for the co-creation of new knowledge and its sharing in wider networking between our international partners across the Water Security Hub.”

Diana

“As a Water Hub researcher, I’ve had the opportunity to meet people with great academic and personal qualities, who complement and challenge me to be increasingly inclusive and interdisciplinary in my work. Key to this is understanding interactions between local conditions and global dynamics that affect decision-making processes involving water. From considering these interactions, I’ve identified the need to develop synergies between the visions and perceptions of water that communities have, and water system policy and management which can contribute to their quality of life. This includes the implementation of specific actions such as efficient water management in agriculture and rainwater harvesting as well as strengthening water management through indigenous and small farmers associations.”

Helen

“As a Water Hub researcher based in the UK, I am currently lucky to be ‘working from home’ from a 60-foot narrowboat. Researching water values while living afloat involves paying close attention to the waterscapes which I move through on a daily basis – noting subtle differences between the canal (as a heritage and leisure environment which links urban and rural areas), and rivers (particularly unique ecosystems such as chalk streams that intersect with the navigation on the Kennet and Avon, where I am currently based) and exploring the ways people interact with these landscapes. Due to COVID travel restrictions, although fieldwork with our Collaboratory colleagues is not currently possible, I am travelling the UK inland waterways, developing visual and ethnographic research methods for recording the socio-cultural aspects of water. As I do this, working closely – albeit remotely – alongside colleagues from Colombia continually challenges me to adopt an expansive, holistic approach when documenting and reflecting on these waterscapes.”

Maggie

“In 1989, as part of my student year in practice, I spent three months investigating reafforestation projects in Colombia and Ecuador funded by a Landscape Institute Travel Award. I interviewed a number of people while travelling, including three influential landscape architects in Colombia: Martha Fajardo, Gloria Aponte and Lyda Caldas de Borrero. My diary of the time records some hair-raising experiences, but it also reflects how kind and courteous these three were in particular, and also the wonderful work they were doing in spite of the extraordinarily difficult context at that time. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this trip changed the course of my career. As Co-Investigator for the Water Security & Sustainability Hub, I now feel privileged to be working with colleagues in Colombia, where an integrated and collaborative approach to consideration of water in the landscape seems to be second nature. We in the UK are learning a lot from exchanges, even though these are currently at a distance. I really look forward to being able to revisit Colombia soon, and I feel privileged to be working with an excellent group of early career researchers in the UK and across all four Collaboratories.”

Maggie Roe is an Academic Fellow of the Landscape Institute and Reader in Landscape Planning Research & Policy Engagement at Newcastle University. Her focus within the UKRI GCRF Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub is on understanding socio-cultural values, in mentoring Early Career Researchers and developing interdisciplinary research methods. Dr. Diana Ruiz is a researcher at the University of Cauca, Colombia, working with the Hub and local projects for water and food sustainability.

Dr. Helen Underhill is a Research Associate within the Hub at Newcastle University, developing creative methods for research on socio-cultural values of water. Professor Miguel R. Peña-Varón is an environmental scientist at the University of Valle, Colombia working in the interface between natural and social science focusing on the human:nature relationship. Miguel is in charge of coordinating the Colombian research team.

3. Small farmers in Las Piedras River basin, Department of Cauca, in the community work of planting with agroecological practices for food sovereignty.

Source: ASOCAMPO 2019.

4. San Francisco river canyon, upper Cauca river basin, department of Cauca.

Source: Martínez J.2018

Source: Martínez J.2018