Bolivia’s best deals

All of the ecosystems on Earth are within basins. A basin may be defined as a “territorial unit that drains water from a river through an outflow of the precipitation through the landscape up to the effluents and the main channel” (Smith, de Groot, Bergkamp, 2006).

While the water flows through the landscape, several ecosystems in the basin afford benefits in the form of goods and services to users and other water systems below. These include the supplying of fish and drinking water, regulation of hydrologic currents and the climate, support for the formation of soil and towards the nutrient cycle, aside from improving cultural, educative, aesthetic and spiritual activities. In this manner, hydric environmental services can be defined as the benefits for the nature and well-being of humans afforded by the ecosystems of a hydrographic basin.

However, in several zones in Bolivia, the growing deforestation of the jungle in the high basin is causing severe impacts in the availability of water in the lower portions, especially in the dry season, causing high financial losses for the country every year with drought and forest fires, which have been increasingly frequent. Consequently, it is critical to protect or restore these ecosystems to ensure water and production for the population.

The hillsides of the Bolivian tropical Andes are home to the most biodiverse forests in the world, the majestic Amboró National Park that in its 637 thousand hectares protects 10% of the species of birds in existence on the planet. This is a park that offers a multiple variety of hydric environmental services to several populations in cities nearby, such as the communities of Santa Rosa de la Lima e Los Negros, located in the municipality of Pampagrande in the Santa Cruz Department, to the southern border of this wonderful and fragile ecosystem.

(foto 3 direita) In the fertile valleys of both communities farmers produce an ample variety of vegetables, fruits and greens that are sold in the markets of one of the greatest urban centers of Bolivia, the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. However, unfortunately in the last 20 years the flow of water to irrigate these plantations has diminished notably and the producers in the lower basin blame deforestation and forest fires caused by farmers of the basin’s upper region, who have been deforesting the jungle to change the use of the land for agriculture and livestock breeding purposes, seriously affecting the provision of water for the populations of the lower basin. This situation has generated tension for many years between both communities, which have even interrupted communication with each other. In their defense, the owners of the higher basin say that they could not avoid felling and burning the forest since they needed the income to feed their families.

Pilot project

Aware of these problems, the Natura Bolivia Foundation began in 2003 a pilot project to compensate for environmental services at the basin of Los Negros river, aiming at helping communities to protect their water through the conservation of the forest, an innovative scheme that allowed the populations of Santa Rosa and Los Negros to resolve their differences over a common source of water, reaching an agreement in which farmers of the higher basin decided to conserve their high-altitude forests in exchange for a bee breeding box and technical knowhow for the production of honey for every 10 hectares of conserved forest per year. This compensation meant an encouragement to farmers of the higher basin for the opportunity to maintain their forest standing and avoid deforestation.

The knowledge and experience of this initiative motivated the signing of tripartite covenants to obtain the creation of public and private fund between the company supplying the water service in the zone (EPSA), the Natura Bolivia Foundation and the Municipal Authority of Pampagrande. Each of these parties supports a local fund with a sum of money, which in the case of EPSA is collected by means of an apportionment that it charges its users in its monthly water bill for the concept of environmental services. This amount varies between 0.20 and 0.60 cents of a dollar for each user, approximately 8% of its total fees, according to a monthly consumption average. All the money gathered by the fund is used to compensate and support individual and collective owners with apiculture boxes for the production of honey, plants to promote fruit tree cultivation and barbed wire to surround their buildings and avoid the ingress of cattle to the basin heads, which is harmful for the quality of water.

Also, the money of these environment funds is used to purchase important high altitude forest areas for the hydric environmental services they provide, aiming at conserving them forever. Another activity is the environmental education afforded to the population and, especially, for the farmers of the higher basin, teaching them the importance to preserve the forest water and life chain.

To ensure that the compromised areas are being effectively protected and that the covenants are being observed, the technical staff of Natura conducts monitoring tasks on a frequent basis together with EPSA, which ensures the efficient use of the materials delivered for compensation.

Successful experience spreads to other municipalities

The success obtained in the conservation project in the community of Los Negros has sparked the interest of other 8 municipalities of the Department (state) of Santa Cruz to implement the same project, affording the initiative to grow from a local municipal endeavor to a state-wide action. Today, all these municipalities already count on their own environmental funds, and similarly to the Los Negros project, by means of tripartite covenants, there are almost 4,025 conserved hectares in the adjacent zones to the Amboró National Park and another 350 hectares around the Rio Grande Valles Cruceños Reservation.

This is how the compensation projects for environmental services (CSA) or the mutual water agreements (ARA) as they are also known, aside from protecting and ensuring the supplying of water to local populations, managed to improve the quality of life and the economy of more than 4,600 Bolivian families of scarce resources, converting conservation into something economically feasible and enabling the “forest, water and life” chain to be preserved in a sustainable manner throughout time.

But could this work on a larger scale?

Not far from these municipalities is the second largest city in Bolivia, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, with its 1.5 million inhabitants considered, according to studies (Fund. City Mayors), one of the 20 cities with the highest growth rate in the world. Forecasts predict that it will reach 1.8 million inhabitants by 2017, a situation that puts pressure on the city’s aquifers, due to the increase in water pumping and the higher rate of contamination.

That is why the results obtained in these townships enable one to think big and believe that it would be possible to reproduce such initiatives on a larger scale, seeking to benefit people in greater numbers, effectively conserving more hectares of forests. This is how the Natural Bolivia Foundation has been currently working on the creation of a departmental fund to protect the sources of water in Santa Cruz, called FONACRUZ, through which it intends to involve different companies in industries of the private sector, plus municipal authorities around the city and departmental and municipal governments of Santa Cruz, among other institutions. The idea is to build a fund with enough capital to be able to finance the efficient protection of high altitude jungles for the future for the multiple environmental services they offer to the population, such as the provision and the supplying of water, which, in the case of the city of Santa Cruz, is sourced from underground reservoirs that feed from water that derives from the forests located less than 60 kilometers from the city – which are seriously threatened by deforestation and forest fires.

To this end, Natura already has an initial fund of 280 thousand dollars, and expects to reach some 5 million dollars in five years, managing to generate sufficient revenue on an annual basis that can finance different projects and activities for conservation in the distinct natural areas close to the city, such as the Amboró National Park, the Parabanó and the Rio Grande Valles Cruceños Reservation. Activities such as the hiring of more park rangers to keep an eye on the areas, the compensation for owners of jungles in the higher basin, environmental education for the population, mitigation of natural disasters and other activities could be made possible with the implementation of the FONACRUZ initiative.

Finally, if humanity continues to make bad use of its hydric resources and ecosystems on which it depends, individuals and societies will, in the end, suffer social and economic insecurity for their rivers, lakes and underground water reserves, which will be severely degraded and will have to face increasingly serious conflicts in times of scarcity (UICN 2000).


Eduardo Franco Berton is a legal advisor for Natura Bolívia, an organization supported by the Avina Foundation that conducts activities in the Amazon and a member of the Aliança Regional Amazônica (ARA).


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