Bolivia has influenced the international water arenas as a pioneer of the Human Water Rights Declaration before the United Nations General Council. However, despite a positive but rather ideological evolution, the country is still facing several water challenges in practice. Water governance is extremely complex due to intricate social structures, important spatial and temporal differences in the availability of water resources, ecological fragility, and weak institutions. A Transdisciplinary Learning Community approach has been adopted by the Universidad Católica Boliviana to take into account the complexity of the water problems caused by social, hydrological, and ecological system imbalances. In this approach, researchers and non-academic actors work closely together to integrate different ways of conceiving, using, valuing, and deciding on water issues. The approach aims at co-creating resilient solutions by recovering and restoring not only the ecological system, but also the social system in which all actors are aware of their role and responsibility. We explain the challenges and concerns raised by this approach in a case study of the Katari River Basin (KRB), which is impacted by a high degree of contamination that is mainly caused while crossing El Alto city, leading to dramatic consequences for the Lake Titicaca ecosystem and its surrounding communities.
The increase of human interventions and developments are modifying the land use/land cover (LULC) of the global landscape, thus severely affecting the water quality of rivers and lakes. Appropriate management and effective policy developments are required to deal with the problems of surface water contamination around the globe. However, spatiotemporal variations of water quality and its complex relation with land cover (LC) changes, challenge adequate water resources management. In this study, we explored the use of remote sensing to relate LC change in the Katari River Basin (KRB) located in the Bolivian Andes and water quality on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in order to support water management. An unsupervised classification of Landsat 7 satellite images and trajectory analysis was applied to understand the modifications of LC through time. In addition, water-quality indicators at the outlet of the basin were retrieved from remote-sensing images and its temporal behavior was analyzed. The results show that the expansion of urban areas is the predominant environmental driver in the KRB, which has great impact on the water quality of Lake Titicaca. We conclude that there is a strong link between the rapid growth of urban and industrial areas with the detriment of river and lake water quality. This case study shows how remote sensing can help understand driver–impact relations.
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