When the flow of a tropical island nation’s most important river varies by 80% between the dry and wet seasons, something is amiss. In a conserved watershed, the volume of water only fluctuates by 20%, pointing to the role of healthy lands in trapping and slowly releasing moisture as opposed to having water run off in a flash.
Such is the predicament of the Northern Yaque river in the Dominican Republic, a mountainous Caribbean country of 10.5 million. Today, water pressure on the river is around 96%, meaning that virtually all the water that the river can be counted on to carry permanently is committed to use by a growing urban population, plantations, and industries. But change, with both short- and long-term gains, is underway.
For the past 15 years, dedicated partnerships convening the civil society, public, and private sectors have come up with sustainable land and water management strategies that work for everybody —smallholders, utilities providers, financiers—, creating a blueprint from which others can draw inspiration.
Experts working to rehabilitate the Northern Yaque watershed, which covers 14.6% of the country, talked us through their process and the success factors in improving the water security of more than 1,8 million people, while building drought resilience in the face of climate change.
1. Partnering with water users
The civil society-led Plan for the Development of the Northern Yaque Watershed, or Plan Yaque, convenes 32 civil society and governmental institutions to reforest water catchment areas, train farmers in sustainable land and water management, and help communities treat wastewater before it is released into the river.
In turn, Plan Yaque is a technical advisor and a key project implementer of the Northern Yaque Water Fund, a financial and governance mechanism launched in 2015 to raise and administer funds for water security in the watershed.
The Fund, which is one of two such structures in the Dominican Republic, brings together 27 partners, including the Ministry of Environment, universities, and the water utility company of the country’s second largest city, Santiago. Additionally, it involves major users like manufacturing companies and banana, rice, and tobacco producer associations —crucial since agriculture accounts for an estimated 85% of water consumption in the area.
“The Water Fund is built on the notion that no single stakeholder can do it alone,” says executive director of the Water Fund Walkiria Estévez, who notes that the Dominican Republic is one of the most water stressed countries in the world.
2. Ensuring financial sustainability
Private sector partners contribute economically to the Fund, while each of the customers of the water utility company of Santiago contributes a small amount.
The money is then invested in different portfolios and 75% of the profits are used in support of nature-based solutions for water security. The rest is channeled back into the Fund to grow it. But how did the fund get the private sector on board in the first place?
“We don’t speak of donations, but of investments,” says Estévez. “The private sector is investing to secure a crucial input —water— for their operations now and in the future. Ultimately, it is about having users take responsibility for managing a vital resource sustainably.”
3. Upholding accountability
For Estévez, measuring results, financial accountability, and transparency have been central to gaining and maintaining the trust of partners, as has been starting with low-investment, high-impact interventions that are based on science.
“We did not wait for the trust fund to reach a substantial size to start funding projects and presenting results. That was vital to prove that our model worked and to keep the momentum,” she says.
However, she notes that continuing to grow the fund is important to bring successful strategies to scale and to support new ones. For example, upcoming trainings to help lowland farmers conserve soils and improve water use efficiency, which currently stands at less than 30%, according to technical project coordinator Alberto Lizardo.
4. Deploying nature-based solutions
One of the star interventions in the watershed are artificial wetlands, treatment systems that use natural processes involving wetland vegetation, soils, and their associated microbial diversity to improve water quality.
Plan Yaque is the NGO behind the development and implementation of these low-tech, low-maintenance systems, which have proved to be a transformative solution for rural communities. They have so far built 34 of them.
The wastewater from the septic tanks at homes and schools is channeled to the constructed wetland, where microorganisms, aquatic plants, and sunlight remove more than 90% of the pollutants, before the water is released into the river. Water pollution is, alongside flow reduction, one of the two main issues jeopardizing water security in the basin.
“The nature-based system works wonderfully and does not need inputs or maintenance, beyond removing the sewage sludge every three months, which communities do themselves” says founder and executive director of Plan Yaque Humberto Checo, one of the leading figures in the watershed restoration and management movement in the country.