PHOTO: Andrés Guhl
Colombia boasts a plentiful and active hydrological cycle centered around the Andes mountains.
PU
Wate r m a n a g e m e n t i n Colombia has been limited a nd react ive , a nd there fore unsustainable, and this poses a dilemma: to go on doing ‘more of the same’ and see our water resources deteriorate, or to develop and implement novel, proactive management systems which set out to ensure that those resources are exploited in a sustainable manner. This concern, which is shared by various countries, has led to a new paradigm developing and gaining strength: Sustainable Territorial Systems, based on the principle that an activity is sustainable when the land where it takes place is also sustainable. T h e g o a l i s t o g e n e ra t e sustainable territories, meaning by this a complex creation resulting from the interaction between social and natural processes. One of these goals is that development should take place within the limits and capabilities of the supporting ecosystems, so as to ensure quality of life and social progress over time.
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This principle clearly applies to the city - one of the most important human creations, if not the most important of all since cities are where most of the population live and engage in their various activities. To make cities sustainable, the regions around them and which provide them with the essential ecosystem services they need if they are to function should also be sustainable. The concept of ‘territory’ as a unit presupposes participative planning and joint management at both urban and rural levels, based around a symbiotic and functional interrelation between the two. It is impossible to conceive of sustainable cities unless their hinterland is sustainable, too. In order to bring this change to fruition, it is proposed that a more effective territorial governance be introduced which sets out to generate sustainable territories through the use of novel forms of planning and broader and more participative territorial management. This should be based
on integrating water and territory management, recognizing that the two are interdependent as well as the fact that water is vital and that it plays a powerful role in land management. This new model is called Integrated Water and Territory Management (GIAT, in Spanish). The first step on the road to success is to precisely define the territory where it will apply by going beyond the supra-municipal vision and broadening the scope to include the region and the long term, then designing it in every case on the basis of the individual characteristics of nature and society in each territory and the numerous, diverse public and private water users who need to be coordinated and should cooperate in order to achieve the common goal. The absence of any water governance system with this perspective is due to the fact that although water is defined as a public good, the system favors private interests and is based on a restrictive criterion that does not recognize spatial interdependencies, the regional nature of the hydrology cycle and the forms and ecosystems of the territory, which are generally supra-municipal. The basin has been considered the most ap propr i ate water
GIAT needs to have a very sound scientific basis, due to the uncertainty caused by natural phenomena, unsustainable socioeconomic activities and urbanization processes.