Watershared

Reciprocal watershed agreements—otherwise known as Watershared agreements—are simple, grassroots versions of incentive-based conservation that help upper watershed forest and land managers to sustainably manage their forest and water resources to benefit both themselves and downstream water users. Watershared agreements focus on changing behaviour through economic and non-economic incentives and building institutional capacity: in other words, on showing local authorities and water users that watershed protection is in their own interests, and then on helping to create the institutional framework needed to plan and implement it. By mid-2018, 54 Bolivian municipalities had appropriated and adapted the Watershared model and had changed the behavior of almost 250,000 people: 7,000 upstream farmers were conserving 350,000 ha of water-producing forest, and 240,000 downstream users were paying them approximately US $1 million a year to do so. In this session we will learn how the program is implemented, and the plans for scale-up in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.