Why is Water an Issue?
According to Bolivia's Minister for the Environment and Water, Carlos Ortuño, Bolivia has made significant improvements when it comes to access to water under the leadership of President Evo Morales, with investments steadily rising.
The 2009 Constitution of Bolivia has introduced access to drinking water and sanitation as a human right. A clear change in rights as previous governments privatized water as a means to attract private investors, leading to unaffordable prices and environmental damages for farmers, eventually resulting in the so-called "water war" of Cochabamba in the year 2000.
Due to the commitment of the Bolivian government, today, more than 9.7 million people have access to water. This corresponds to about 86 percent of the population. Of the urban population, 95 percent of people have access to water, compared to 67 percent in rural areas. In 2005, before Evo Morales took office, only 68 percent of the population in urban areas had access to water, while in the countryside it was just 44 percent.
Irrigation systems have also improved since Evo Morales took office. At the moment, the country is irrigating 500,000 hectares of land by the various sprinkler systems and other technologies, improving the agricultural sector and food security as a whole.
Bolivia aims to have the entire populations access to water secured by the year 2025 and seems to be making vast progress in the area.
Bolivia's drinking water and sanitation coverage has greatly improved since 1990 due to a considerable increase in sectoral investment. However, the country continues to suffer from what happens to be the continent's lowest coverage levels and from low quality of services. Political and institutional instability have contributed to the weakening of the sector's institutions at the national and local levels.
Two concessions（特许权） to foreign private companies in two of the three largest cities—Cochabamba and La Paz/El Alto—were prematurely ended in 2000 and 2006 respectively. The country's second largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, relatively successfully manages its own water and sanitation system by way of cooperatives（合作社？）. The government of Evo Morales intends to strengthen citizen participation within the sector. Increasing coverage requires a substantial increase of investment financing.
According to the government the main problems in the sector are：
1. low access to sanitation throughout the country;
2. low access to water in rural areas; insufficient and ineffective investments;
3. a low visibility(短视) of community service providers;
4. a lack of respect of indigenous customs;
5. "technical and institutional difficulties in the design and implementation of projects";
6. a lack of capacity to operate and maintain infrastructure;
7. an institutional framework that is "not consistent with the political change in the country";
8. "ambiguities in the social participation schemes";
9. a reduction in the quantity and quality of water due to climate change;
10. pollution and a lack of integrated water resources management;
11. and the lack of policies and programs for the reuse of wastewater.
URL: wiki: Water supply and sanitation in Bolivia ，2013
Having access to clean water should be a basic human right for people all over the world. However, obtaining clean water is not always so easy in developing countries like Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America. In 2000, especially during its water war in Cochabamba, Bolivian citizens had a limited supply of clean water in Bolivia. After the privatization of the water system, prices surged and it became illegal to collect rainwater. This led to extreme protests in Cochabamba where protestors spoke out against abusive water laws. As a result, the government decided to stop increasing the prices of water and vowed to eliminate its privatization program.
Contaminated Water Causes Health Issues
Even after the water war, many citizens still grappled with access issues. As of 2017, more than “three million people in rural areas” did not have clean water. For this reason, many people who live in the countryside suffer from gastrointestinal illnesses from contaminated water. Contamination has the potential to increase since Bolivia faces environmental threats that can greatly deplete or harm already existing water sources.
Drought Threatens Water Security
The year 2016 brought the worst drought Bolivia has seen since the ’80s. More than 400,000 people in cities across the country did not have an adequate water supply. As explained by the United Nations, an important cause of the decline is that 40% of Bolivia’s glaciers have melted in the last 20 years. Water rationing is common in urban areas and the lack of water also impacts rural areas and small farms where crop yields diminish yearly
Clean Water Initiative
A project called WEAP, or the Water Evaluation And Planning tool, helps the country foresee and plan the future of water security for its citizens. This tool provides officials with a detailed model of Bolivia’s lakes, streams and rivers to calculate water security at the current moment and in the years to come. WEAP, formed in efforts to improve water conditions in areas all over the country, gives measurements about the available water supply using satellites. The program also trained 40 water planners to process the data.
The Bolivian government vowed to allocate millions of dollars to resolving water scarcity concerns. Under the leadership of President Evo Morales, it has kept its word by dedicating almost $3 million in the past 13 years towards securing access to clean water, sanitation and irrigation systems. Investments are also still rising, which is promising for the citizens of Bolivia.
All of these steps have put Bolivia on the right path toward ensuring clean water for all of its citizens. Around 86% of the entire population now has access to safe drinking water, and more than 95% of city residents can obtain clean water. Additionally, 78% of rural residents no longer have to worry about water security, which is almost a 35% increase since 2005.
So far, the Bolivian government is seeing great success in reaching its goal to provide clean water access to the entire population by 2025. In 2009, the Bolivian Constitution officially declared access to drinking water and sanitation a human right. The Bolivian people came together to form “water committees” to spread information about the management of water resources, sanitation and environmental challenges.
– Karin Filipova， 2020 . 8. 22
URL：https://www.borgenmagazine.com/clean-water-in-bolivia/
At the beginning of 2000, thousands of inhabitants of Cochabamba, a city located in the centre of Bolivia, took to the streets to protest against the privatisation of the drinking water and sanitation services in favour of the multinational company Bechtel. The conflict reached its highest point on the 8th April, when the government of Hugo Banzer declared the state of siege（围困逼降）. There were more than one hundred injured and a 17-year old boy died. The executives of Bechtel left Cochabamba on the 10th April, the privatisation law was revoked and the water supply returned to public hands. A legend had just been born: The Water War in Cochabamba.
Beyond the Water War and the socio-political conflicts, the fight for water in Bolivia is the consequence of a much broader problem. Nowadays, around three million people in rural areas (30% of its population) lack water security and five million do not have access to adequate sanitation. On the other hand, Bolivia is one of the most threatened countries by climate change. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) presented a report in 2013 in which it already alerted to the problems the Andean highlands would experience due to climate change, a situation that is especially unjust as it is one of the countries that emits less greenhouse gases.
联合国开发计划署 (UNDP) 于 2013 年提交了一份报告，其中已经警告安第斯高地因气候变化而面临的问题，这种情况尤其不公平，因为他们是温室气体排放量较少的国家之一。
The report stated that the average temperature in Bolivia was rising and could increase up to 2 ºC by 2030, and from 5 to 6 ºC by 2100. Its environmental vulnerability is due mainly to the existence of very different ecosystems and a growing deforestation. The report also stated that in the last 25 years, the Andean country had been affected by severe flooding in certain regions, caused by El Niño, combined with intense and long droughts.
As a terrible confirmation of the forecast included in this report, Bolivia was hit in 2016 by the most severe drought since the 80s, as a result of a very intense El Niño. This serious water crisis affected the cities of Oruro, Potosí, Cochabamba, Sucre and, above all, La Paz, where more than 400.000 inhabitants were left without water supply for several weeks. In the countryside, some areas in the highlands lost up to 90% of the crops and the government declared the state of national emergency. A visible example of the crisis is the drying up of the Poopó Lake located in the Oruro highlands, which is a historically unstable water mass, whose volume decreases due to the drop of rainfall.
The drought ended abruptly – also confirming the UNPD forecast – with violent flooding that started at the end of December and extended throughout the month of January.
A solid fighting spirit for a fundamental human right
Resilience is defined as the capacity of human beings to adapt positively to adverse situations. This water suffering has made the Bolivian people especially resilient to the lack of water. Central Itocta: after the war shows a beautiful example of resilience: citizen action, in view of the lack of effective political decisions to guarantee the water supply, led to the creation of "water committees."
These associations gather the knowledge on the management of water resources, climatology and the emergency response actions and they transmit it to the community creating a solid awareness and promoting the water culture. This has allowed a new path for the recovery of the access to water in a sustainable and participatory way.
The projects developed by the We Are Water Foundation in Bolivia have an impact on these issues and are a good example of the actions needed to combat the water crisis and the lack of sanitation in the country: Water, sanitation and hygiene in schools in the Chaco-Chuquisaqueño, in collaboration with Unicef, and Ancestral culture to save the water of Lake Titicaca in collaboration with Educo. Bolivia needs to become a model from which the entire world has to learn.
这些协会收集有关水资源管理、气候学和应急行动的知识，并将其传播给社区，以建立牢固的意识并促进水文化。这为以可持续和参与性的方式恢复用水提供了一条新途径。 玻利维亚 We Are Water Foundation 开发的项目对这些问题产生了影响，是应对该国水危机和缺乏卫生设施所需采取的行动的一个很好的例子：学校的水、环境卫生和个人卫生（与联合国儿童基金会合作），与 Educo 合作运用祖传文化拯救的喀喀湖的水。玻利维亚需要成为全世界都必须学习的榜样。
URL： https://www.wearewater.org/en/resilient-bolivia-an-example-to-overcome-the-water-crisis_280381
Reuse and reduce: The case for better wastewater treatment in Bolivia
Editor’s Note: Efficiently investing in wastewater and other sanitation infrastructure is crucial to achieve public health benefits, improve the environment, and enhance quality of life. Safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services are an essential part of preventing disease and protecting human health during infectious disease outbreaks, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more: www.worldbank.org/wastetoresource
In the last two decades, Bolivia has made good progress in improving access to water supply and sanitation (WSS) services. Yet, even though access to piped water and wastewater collection has increased, the quality of those services is still not optimal, especially for the poorer population. Service interruptions and sewer blockages are common. The quality of water and wastewater service delivery also remains a challenge, especially in areas facing water scarcity.
In Bolivia, it is estimated that only 27 percent of wastewater is treated (WSP, 2016). In cities with over 10,000 residents, the wastewater treatment rate is only 39 percent. Wastewater treatment facilities in cities like El Alto, Oruro, Cochabamba and Tarija need to be upgraded and expanded; whereas the capital city La Paz, with nearly 800,000 inhabitants, does not even have treatment facilities. Instead, untreated wastewater is discharged into the Choqueyapu and La Paz Rivers – further increasing water pollution and putting human health at risk.
Urban expansion has significantly increased domestic and industrial water demand in Bolivia, and untreated wastewater is frequently reused for irrigation in water-scarce areas. Polluted water downstream of the La Paz River is used for irrigation with no restrictions. But its informal use, due to a lack of regulation, poses potential risks to the health of urban consumers of agricultural products as well as the health of farmers and their families.
To tackle these challenges, the Ministry of Environment and Water (Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua - MMAyA) started in 2017 to develop a National Strategy for Wastewater Management and Reuse, which aims to both address water pollution and public health issues caused by low levels of wastewater treatment and unregulated use in agriculture, and to promote reuse within the broader concept of a circular economy. The Global Water Security & Sanitation Partnership (GWSP), a multi-donor trust fund housed within the World Bank’s Water Global Practice, has been providing technical assistance to the formulation of the Strategy.
To achieve these goals, specifically in La Paz, the construction of a wastewater treatment plant is urgently needed, as well as a network of trunk sewers and emissaries to transport the wastewater to the treatment plant itself.
But building a new facility is just the beginning. To ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of the new La Paz wastewater management system, operation and maintenance plans need to be developed and robustly implemented. Support also needs to go to: (i) strengthening the policy, institutional, regulatory and financing frameworks regarding wastewater management; (ii) increasing public awareness regarding the importance of and the costs associated with wastewater treatment; (ii) promoting environmental recuperation of the watercourses located in the Choqueyapu and La Paz rivers’ watersheds to reduce public health risks and create green areas in La Paz city; and (v) enhancing resource recovery from wastewater treatment to promote water and biosolids reuse for agriculture and land restoration.
To close the gap on sanitation in Bolivia, it also needs to go beyond conventional wastewater collection and treatment solutions and consider non-conventional sanitation arrangements, including off-sewage network solutions and fecal sludge management, among others.
Our experience in supporting wastewater management – both region-specific and global – also reveals important lessons, including:
- The choice of wastewater technologies should be based on full life-cycle costs (i.e., investment costs, and operation and maintenance costs).
- The positive social implications of the facilities should be considered over the entire cycle: jobs generated by the construction, operation, and maintenance of the plant; increases in property values following the improvement of the receiving water body; alternative water sources for farmers from reuse; and improved health from better water quality.
- The importance of ensuring that utilities have adequate capacity to operate and maintain wastewater treatment. Relatedly, the need to ensure that utilities generate enough revenues to pay for operation and maintenance costs.
The WSS sector in Bolivia consists of a few institutions. For example, MMAyA, its Vice-Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (Viceministerio de Agua Potable y Saneamiento Basico - VAPSB) and the Vice-Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (Viceministerio de Recursos Hídricos y Riego), are the sector authorities responsible for water and wastewater policies, technical standards and norms, and budgeting for sector investments when these are prioritized by the central government. The provision of WSS services, on the other hand, is the responsibility of municipal governments. Municipalities can provide these services directly or through entities providing basic water and sewerage services (Entidades Prestadoras de Servicios Basicos de Agua y Alcantarillado, EPSAS), which in urban areas normally adopt the structure of municipal or service cooperatives. In this sense, cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder collaboration is also key to the success of Bolivia’s wastewater strategy. To achieve that, the national and municipal governments, as well as the water utility, with support from the World Bank and other development partners, are working together to incorporate circular economy principles in the design of the La Paz wastewater treatment plant.
Wastewater can be a valuable resource if the right policies, technologies and financial incentives are in place. The World Bank stands ready to support Bolivia in increasing wastewater treatment and reuse coverage rates to ultimately reduce water pollution and achieve environmental recuperation, improve the health of populations and contribute to building climate resilience in agricultural areas surrounding urban cities.
- ALFONSO ALVESTEGUI ， 2020 . 3. 19
URL：https://blogs.worldbank.org/water/reuse-and-reduce-case-better-wastewater-treatment-bolivia
