Reliable Water Supply in an Unpredictable Climate:

Q. Tell us a little about how this project got started.

Colombia’s Water and Sanitation sector decided to prioritize the improvement of water supply systems for households and small businesses. Same as anywhere in the world, communities in Colombia depend on their access to clean water. However, some effects of climate change like frequent heavy rainfalls, floods, and droughts contaminate water supplies and damage sewage systems by overwhelming the capacity of their operations. Help was needed by water service suppliers to run more reliable, efficient, and cost-effective businesses.

We started our work by taking a closer look at the conditions of domestic water supply and management in Guatavita, a town of about 1,000 residents with a rich Indigenous history, roughly a two-hour drive north of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá.

Q. What makes Guatavita a good place to pilot this EWS?

Guatavita often deals with extreme weather events, but lacks the proper resources and help needed to build its resilience. Its water supplier is a small company with under 10 staff members, with most of its operational records kept in large paper notebooks. Unlike the sophistication of big city water or energy systems, Guatavita’s rudimentary model is an example—not an exception—of countryside service providers’ reality. It depicts the chasm that exists between ambitious strategies and policies at the national level and the limited resources that the little guy has to work with.

Q. How will the EWS help?

Colombia’s Water and Sanitation sector understands the need to modernize these systems and adjust their operations to prepare for climate change impacts. To that end, my team at the NAP Global Network and our consultants supported the development of an EWS that would enable the integration of meteorological data, community monitoring, and financial considerations into the supplier’s operations and decision making.

When fully implemented, the EWS will be an important support tool to maximize the efficiency of the water supplier’s everyday functions and minimize service interruptions to Guatavita’s residents. Additionally, it will provide the system operator with better navigation of the increasingly unpredictable weather.

Q. What makes this project different from other EWS installations?

Now, what makes this EWS stand out is how it aims to make people’s well-being a central objective of its operation. It does this by not only looking at the actual climate-related hazards, but by linking the effectiveness of the EWS to the water supplier’s sound financial practices. After all, it is the consequences of inadequate financial management or insufficient funds that can lead to poor service provision and disruptions in the water supply to residents.

Beyond its local impact, the cherry on top of this small project—and its ultimate test—will be its ability to convey to national decision-makers the institutional, social, and technical conditions needed to mainstream climate change considerations into the lifelines of its society; namely its water, agriculture, social prosperity, energy, health, and infrastructure sectors, among others.

Q. How does the EWS tie into national climate change policies and actions?

This small project will contribute to the three key principles of the country’s National Adaptation Plan:

1. Actively manage the knowledge generated around climate change and its impacts—by linking meteorological data and disaster risk reduction knowledge to the operation of local water supply systems.
2. Incorporate climate change adaptation into environmental, land-use, and sectoral planning—by recognizing that adaptation efforts must target the biophysical impacts of hazards, as well as the different effects they have on members of a community, based on gender, age, income, and (dis)abilities, among other factors.
3. Promote the transformation of development models to make them resilient to climate change—by linking structural change to fairer governance processes, thereby seeking to ensure people’s well-being.

Q. What is the current status of this EWS?

While the progress we made so far is important to note, talking about the Guatavita EWS today is, actually, a bit audacious. There are currently very few tangible results to show for it, if any. Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from having a wider dialogue with citizens, which we planned to do in the design stage. We intended to have their concerns more directly reflected in the questions that the EWS sets out to answer.

The actual implementation of the EWS has yet to be undertaken. However, the long journey preparing for its operation on the ground is completed: the technical design is ready, everyone involved agrees on the proposed process, and, equally importantly, the institutional architecture required to get a buy-in from decision-makers has been arranged.

When looking at the bigger picture, this new vision that links community resilience to the reliability of services will encourage key stakeholders, from both Bogotá and Guatavita, to make the town’s water supply system an example that steers future policy and action at the national level.