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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.