ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT OF LAGUNA DEL SAUCE AND ITS ASSOCIATED BASIN

The aim of the network is the development and promotion of adaptive strategies to ensure the sustainability of critical ecosystem services for human well-being.

Laguna del Sauce is the main drinking water reservoir of the Department of Maldonado, the second largest of Uruguay. An accelerated eutrophication in recent decades has generated several interferences in the water supply system. The situation demands new management systems to integrate the multiplicity of institutions involved at national, departmental and municipal levels.

Uruguay is navigating a complex transition in the field of management and conservation of water resources that arise from major transformations in agro-productive systems and significant recent changes in the related policy, legal and institutional frameworks.

The first Basin Commission was established in Uruguay in 2011, precisely with respect to the Laguna del Sauce basin. Basin Commissions represent a major innovation in the Uruguayan institutional framework; they are bridge structures that ensure inter-institutional coordination at different levels, and simultaneously encourage the involvement of key users. The creation of this sphere and its operation are an experiment (broadly defined), a window of opportunity that can aid our understanding of how persistence and transformation coexist in socio-ecological systems, and what conditions promote adaptation processes and transformation.

The network is comprised of specialists in the areas of anthropology, statistics, limnology and dynamics of complex systems.

Bases técnicas para el manejo integrado de Laguna del Sauce y cuenca asociada.

Néstor Mazzeo

nmazzeo@saras-institute.org