Empowering Local Stakeholders for Sustainable Groundwater Management

The International Development Research Centre of Canada approved a 28 month small grants project in 2013:

IDRC/CRDI Canadian Partnerships Program
Grant No.: 107467-00021003-006
Empowering Local Stakeholders for Sustainable Groundwater Management

The Principal Investigator was Laurence R. Bentley of the Department of Geoscience, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada with Co-Investigators Alfredo Duran Centro Agua-Universidad Mayor de San Simon, Cochabamba, Bolivia and Corina Hernandez, Instituto de Aguas, Universidad Mayor Real y Pontifice de San Francisco Xavier, Sucre, Bolivia. Additional partners were the Municipalidad de Cliza and the Canadian Federation of Municipalities (representing Cliza’s Canadian sister city, Truro, Nova Scotia).

The Valle Alto is an agricultural zone in the Department of Cochabamba. Cliza is one of the important municipalities in the region. Since the region is semiarid and has a distinct rainy and dry season, the region is dependent on groundwater for dry season irrigation. To date, the drilling of irrigation supply wells and their production is uncontrolled. The purpose of the project was to study the groundwater system with the objective of establishing and understanding of sustainable groundwater production rates and to work with the population of the municipality to help them implement groundwater management strategies. During the project, several studies were published in the form of MSc and BSc theses and project reports. The reports contain an inventory of wells, the results of hydrogeologic studies, a report on irrigation and a report on problems associated with pumping wells. This site is a repository of these reports.

We encourage the use and dissemination of these data and publications, but require that the source of any data or ideas taken from these reports are acknowledged and properly cited.