Protocolo para la evaluación de la sostenibilidad en el manejo del recurso hídrico

Abstract

Colombia is a country with abundant water sources for this reason it is difficult to talk about sustainability in the management of water resources. However, factors such as climate change, population growth, increased energy consumption, agricultural production and environmental regulations, will be of great importance in the future in defining an environmental policy around this resource and its proper management. This work stems from the need to identify and evaluate the efficiency with which water resources are managed in a river basin, a region, or a population centre. To reach the objective, a number of methodologies based on the assessment of indicators were identified. However, one of the biggest difficulties in working on this type of methodology is linked to the lack of knowledge of some topics and terms that for people in general are strange, which gave a purpose to this protocol. Another difficulty is subjective assessment, which results in ambiguities in the result obtained by the methodology. Taking into account the above considerations, the present protocol was structured for the evaluation of the sustainability of water resources management, which can be applied in different case studies. Each chapter and each indicator was briefly analysed and described in a local context for better interpretation. Similarly, a simple way was established to evaluate each indicator as a traffic light, reducing the evaluation ranges to three levels: green, yellow and red. The green level can be interpreted as a panorama of good water management while in red it is understood as poor management of some indicator of water resource management. Yellow represents an intermediate state with flaws and opportunities for improvement.