Watershared: Conservation, development, and adaptation and mitigation to climate change in Latin America

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. They focus on changing behavior through economic and non-economic incentives and building institutional capacity.

By mid-2019, 58 Bolivian municipalities had appropriated and adapted the Watershared model and had changed the behavior of almost 270,000 people: 7,000 upstream farmers were conserving more than a million acres of water-producing forest, and 260,000 downstream users were paying them approximately US $500,000 a year to do so. The program has also helped create an new protected areas in south eastern Bolivia. 

In this presentation, Dr. Nigel Asquith will discuss how Watershared was initiated in Bolivia, then modified and adapted in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and how the program differs from Payments for Ecosystem Services.

Dr. Nigel Asquith is the director of strategy at the Santa Cruz-based Fundación Natura Bolivia where his team has helped create a more than 734,000 hectares protected area and has set up 40 municipal incentive-based conservation programs. From 2005-2008, he directed the transition of the $17 million EcoFund Foundation to become a strategic conservation investor in northern Ecuador. He has also worked at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for International Forestry Research, Conservation International, and the World Bank. Nigel’s work is currently funded by the European Commission and the MacArthur Foundation, and he previously received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, and the U.K.’s Department for International Development. Nigel’s technical expertise is in plant-animal relations in neotropical forests, ecosystem service valuation, policy analysis, and the impacts of the oil and gas sector on biodiversity. Nigel has an extensive research program assessing the feasibility of market-based tools for environmental management. Nigel has a doctorate in zoology and a master’s in policy from Duke University, a master’s in ecology from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s in geography from Oxford University.

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