Download CATHALAC`s ongoing activities on adaptation and freshwater

Assessing Potential Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in Latin America
and the Caribbean
Background
Arguably, climate is the single most important natural factor influencing sustainable
development in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Year after year, the region’s
vulnerability to recurring climate-related disasters makes headlines in the international
news media. In any event, properly evaluating and understanding the likely impacts of
climate change on different sectors is a challenge for the region’s decision-makers.
Significant efforts have been invested into research of the potential changes in climatic
regimes. That research has largely taken the form of downscaling the outputs from global
climate models (GCMs), in order for the data to have relevance at national and local
scales.
Assessment and research
While the period ~2005 through to the present has seen much downscaled climate
scenario data – from a variety of initiatives – becoming accessible for Mesoamerica and
the Caribbean, there still exists a research gap in terms of comprehensively exploring the
actual implications of the scenario data, to serve as inputs to adaptation planning. In
support of the development of such adaptation plans and policies, CATHALAC and its
partners have, in the last few years, sought to fill that research gap, and has made
particular headway in understanding climate change’s potential impacts in the areas of
biological diversity, forest carbon, and water resources.
Understanding the potential impacts of climate change on the water resources of
Mesoamerica and the Caribbean is important, especially as recent publications, including
the 2010 Atlas of Latin America and the Caribbean and the Latin America and the
Caribbean: Environment Outlook have noted the vulnerability of the region’s water
resources. Thus, in following up an earlier assessment of potential climate change
impacts on regional biodiversity, in the context of the Regional Visualization &
Monitoring System (SERVIR, in Spanish), CATHALAC and its partners the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA have recently completed the
first regional-scale assessment of climate change’s potential impacts on the water
resources of Mesoamerica and the Dominican Republic.
The study was also done in parallel to another assessment of potential impacts on forest
carbon stocks, but focused on potential changes in both water availability and water
quality (the former using surface runoff as an indicator, and the latter using sediment
loading as an indicator). Seven priority and transboundary watersheds (namely the Coco,
Lempa, Motagua, San Juan, Sixaola, Usumacinta, and Yaque del Sur Rivers) were
chosen as domains for the analysis, which indicated that generally, regardless of the
climate change scenarios, there is a trend for lower surface runoff through the 2080s,
indicating that there will likely be less available surface water. The study did not,
however, draw any compelling conclusions on climate change’s potential impacts on
water quality, even as continuing deforestation across the region is expected to further
contribute to overall declines in water quality. The assessment thus goes a step beyond
the general characterization of overall temperature and precipitation changes, which was
conducted also using downscaled climate change scenario data in the 2004-07
UNDP/GEF-supported “Capacity Building for State II Adaptation to Climate Change in
Central American Mexico and Cuba” project, which was also implemented by
CATHALAC along with the region’s respective Ministries of the Environment.
Policy support
Also in terms of on the ground activities, from 2008-2009, CATHALAC, in concert with
the United Nations Environment Programme’s Caribbean Environment Programme
(UNEP CEP) and CATIE implemented the “Climate Change Adaptation and Integration
into Integrated Water Resource Management Plans” project. Focused at the level of
individual local watershed management committees in Guatemala, Honduras, and
Nicaragua, the project published a sourcebook “Policies and Incentive Systems for
Strengthening and Adoption of Agricultural Best Practices as a Climate Change
Adaptation Mechanism in Central America” which is used as a guidebook for climate
change adaptation-related activities.
Adaptive actions on ground
Within the scope of the “Climate Change Adaptation and Integration into Integrated
Water Resource Management Plans” project with UNEP and CATIE, specific adaptation
activities were proposed for integration into the various watershed management plans
implemented across the project’s three countries. Those activities, in turn, were based on
identification of how, according to the best available data, the various aspects of climate
change can be expected to specifically affect each of the respective watersheds.
Awareness and capacity building
Parallel to the aforementioned work, CATHALAC has also engaged water resourcerelated climate change adaptation activities on the ground, from a different angle. For
instance, from 2009-2010, a training program on climate change’s potential impacts in
the globally strategic Panama Canal Watershed was hosted, which trained some 243
teachers and other staff from Panama’s Ministry of Education. That training program
targeted the integration of climate change into the environmental education programs of
the Ministry of Education, in order for on the ground activities to be conceptualized in
light of the Panama Canal Watershed’s importance to global commerce.
Regarding the climate change modeling work, in terms of the project’s capacity-building
and awareness-raising strategy, the study’s results were presented in late March 2011 at
the 2nd regional SERVIR Symposium, to an audience of some 70 representatives from the
region’s environmental ministries, and meteorology and disaster management agencies.
Further dissemination of the project’s results is planned, as well as capacity-building in
the use of the outputs to support national- and local level adaptation planning.