Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is the common perception of the Chilean system that the unique level of
autonomy of the water rights owners allows the system to be highly flexible and
adaptive, since they are not constrained by the inefficiencies of government and
thus can self-organise to manage solutions at their own level, amongst themselves.
However, in practice, the water rights and legal situation in Chile are based on prin-
ciples that neither promote conservation, preservation of currently scarce resources
(though efficiency is an aim) nor protect vulnerable riparian ecosystems. The role of
the water rights holders themselves, whether part of a Junta or not, is seen to be one
of documentation and distribution rather than any responsibility for management of
the resource. Yet in Chile, the subsidiary role of government within the neo-liberal
model delegates as many responsibilities as possible to the private actor, leaving a
gap between resource use and resource management, that currently no one within
the basin is really filling. Even more problematic, the rights structure and informa-
tion upon which the rights allocation has been based, has allowed for the legal over
allocation of the basin, which due to the certainty of the rights themselves (guaran-
teed by the Constitution and Water Code), is inflexible and non-adaptive to decreasing
availability of water.
14.1.2
Knowledge
Knowledge
indicators encompass the long term development and integration of cli-
mate information as well as the perceptions of environmental issues; whether or not
climate change is taken into account in planning and decision making timeframes.
Often, stakeholders elucidated how climate change impacts seemed too distant,
insurmountable or uncertain to incorporate into current
evaluation and planning
.
While data may be at hand to adequately assist coping strategies with drought or
flooding events, in depth studies, monitoring and climate projections may not be
accessible for informing longer term planning strategies.
In the Swiss case, monitoring and assessment networks are maintained and
used across multiple levels and sectors and there are a number of federal and
regional studies and collaborations on long term climate change projections.
While the MINERVE and TRC provide examples of climate change integration
into longer term planning, at other levels (i.e. local) or in other areas of water
management (water provision) long-term effects from climate change (e.g.,
shifting seasonality of hydrological regime; glacial melt tipping points) seem
too far away or too daunting to incorporate into local water management plan-
ning. The examples of collaborative and iterative science driven projects can be
found in the hydropower sector and the TRC project that integrates climate pro-
jections in an iterative and integrative manner for sustainable watercourse man-
agement for both short- and long-term coping. So, while the series of flooding
events were seen to serve as a wakeup call for political and policy action on
developing a longer-term integrative and uncertainty based approach to water-
course management, in most areas of the Valais, alterations in water availability
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