On World Environment Day, the BioCuenca Alliance is launched in Cucutá, Colombia. BioCuenca seeks to generate a collective action platform directed at the environmental conservation of the catchments of the rivers Zulia and Pamplonita in Northern Santander, Colombia.

The “Biocuenca Alliance” (Alianza Biocuenca), a public-private fund to protect the basins of the Zulia and Pamplonita rivers in Colombia, will complete this April its first 10 months of operation. Some important achievements have strengthened this cooperation platform.

The government of Colombia is the first national government to publish a complete multi-sectoral water footprint assessment of all watersheds in its territory. The study was realised by a partnership of the Embassy of Switzerland - Agency of Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), Good Stuff International Latin America and the Caribbean (GSI-LAC) and Centro of Science and Techology of  Antioquia –CTA.

GSI is engaging with the municipality and the Lötschenbach club in order to use publicly available and geographically distributed data provided by the Federal Office of the Environment (BAFU by its German acronym) to prepare a water budget and trigger participation.

This technical paper describes the practical insights gathered from the application of a methodology that seeks to use the current context of a basin as the basis for setting more actionable and realistic water targets.This methodology is illustrated using a Colombian banana farmer which is part of the supply chain of the German supermarket chain Edeka. While the start of this work pre-dates some of the emerging global conversations with respect to Context-/Science-Based Targets for Water – there are some lessons that could be beneficial contributions to the methodology development of Context-/Science-Based Targets for Water.

Download technical document: GSI Technical paper 4: Setting water targets based on catchment context

The USDA Forest Service is assessing the water footprint of the Tenmile river basin located in the Helena National Forest. The objective is to understand the vulnerability of the Tenmile basin by making a founded comparison between the blue water consumption with the blue water availability.

Results from the Water Footprint Assessment applied to the Porce river basin, Colombia, show that the basin has no blue water stress, but it does undergo significant levels of green water scarcity (competition for different uses of land and green water resources) and water pollution in some of Porce’s subbasins.

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