Bridges and Barriers to Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 216

the effect, since changes only applied to new rights. In the Aconcagua, all water
rights are already assigned. Furthermore, the Water Code establishes a highly infor-
mal approach, where 'management' of the resource is devolved to private use right
owners. This has created a form of deadlock between this informality of approach,
a lack of institutional power and a lack of incentives for actors to collaborate together
to find common long term vision of how to prepare for climate change impacts.
Another aspect of this barrier is evident at the Chilean regional level, where the
DGA is relatively powerless to manage the issue of un-regularised rights and
illegal extraction. The DGA allows for the abstraction of water from wells without
water rights, and recognises that this practice is increasing, but that it is not in their
power to 'denunciate' illegal usage, only to track use and non-use of legal water
rights. A private actor must report the illegal abstraction to another institution
(Superintendencia/Judiciary). Additionally, the DGA does not have the ability to
limit or reduce water rights during drought periods (although scarce water resources
are monitored and portioned by individual user groups).
In the Chilean case, stakeholders noted a lack of consideration for climate change
into short and long term evaluation and planning, despite an awareness of the issues
that water related climate change impacts posed to different sectors. Despite gov-
ernment training programmes on increasing irrigation efficiency (from the CNR),
there is no integration of efficiency with climate impacts on water resources or sus-
tainable management. A major barrier in the Chilean case is the data upon which
water allocations and management decisions are based. Despite having a long time
series of hydrological data available to calculate water extraction in dry years, the
water rights were initially adjusted to a series of wet years, which allowed for a high
level of abstraction. A further issue is that there is now very little possibility to
update the data upon which these allocations have been granted, since all water
rights are allocated and protected by the constitution. Furthermore, while the DGA
is responsible for the allocation of water rights, they do not have sufficient informa-
tion and documentation on registered and unregistered rights to be able to effec-
tively account for climate impacts on hydrological resources in the basin.
In Chile there is strong cultural opposition to a volumetric charge for water
usage, particularly in the agricultural sector, where one stakeholder commented that
it would be the 'death of agriculture'. The ideological strength of the market system,
however, limits the potential for alternative solutions to be considered. One expert
pointed to a lack of clarity among irrigators as to the benefits of an increase in water
efficiency, such as the sale or lease of water rights, which highlights the absolute
focus on maximum use of rights as opposed to any considerations for the long term
sustainability of the SES and resilience in the face of climate change impacts.
In the Swiss case, the main barrier related to data and information was seen to
be the high complexity of data collection and maintenance, which was a particular
problem to the mountain communes. While paucity of data was cited, it is worth
noting that the Swiss Alps have a much higher level of data available on water
quantity and quality data than the Chilean Andes, or indeed many other areas. The
challenge is perhaps more related to the number of different databases and multiple
levels at which data is collected and maintained that can create difficulties for