Sorry for my silence. Things have been quite hectic since the wedding with way too much work, closing of the H2020 project WATERAGRI, emotional good-byes at the wee hours in my morning while I was giving closing webinars and presentations in European time zones. And at the same time stepping up my engagement here, in Uruguay. I submitted a mini-project proposal for some initial funds for the environmental education/ecotourism project (I even had to make a 5 minute video pitch…), got more involved in some local water NGO work and then got called a few weeks ago by the only environmentalist Member of Parliament in Uruguay to tell him about the San Jose water transfer project and my views and experiences as he had managed to get the parliamentarian’s backing to call in the Minister of Environment and the head of the state-owned water company to give evidence in parliament on this affair. WOW! I thought. Amazing, my issues are actually being brought up at the highest democratic levels in national parliament.

So, I talked with him, and other opposition parliamentarians, talked some more to the press and then sat for 7 hours in parliament yesterday. My conclusions are rather daunting:

• Apparently, a government entity can do whatever they want during a crisis moment, spend millions of dollars on infrastructure that is supposed to be a temporary fix, only to then claim that this is now a really great permanent (!) solution and that we should all be happy that they did this so fast and so well. That they got to skip all of the safeguarding steps including open Request for Proposals, environmental impact studies, public auditions etc. is just a side note. This scares me, because then democratic processes and rules that we have agreed upon in societies become hollow and lend themselves to corruption or worse dictatorships. And this country knows how dictatorships look like… What will the next crises look like? Will it be a real one or a fake one?
• Also, money can seemingly be spent freely as it seems to be growing on trees (just have a higher dept…) and is not every single tax payer’s. At the beginning of the session costs seemed to be ‘only’ at 25 million USD for an infrastructure that just augments supply instead of fixing the 50+% of non-revenue water (of which at least half are due to leaking pipes!) or curbing demand through recycled water. Towards the end of the 7 hours 60 million were floated if one took into account maintenance and operation, leasing costs, etc. Those had seemingly been forgotten. Mind you all this for a piece of infrastructure that worked for about a week pumping around 40 million m³ of water in total, and where the future utility is unclear. The IPCC projections for Uruguay, unlike in Europe, are rather towards MORE rainfall, and MORE floods and not towards more droughts. Where is the preparedness towards this? In the past floods in March, the only water treatment plant for the capital almost got flooded and had to reduce 30% of their operation. Protection? A couple of sandbags… Now there you would have had 1.7 million people and the most important industries of the country cut off of basic supply and sanitation. But, no, augmenting supply seems to be more important. It’s more visible than fixing underground pipes, you can get more votes. And electoral campaigning time it is! Presidential elections are due towards the end of this year.
• But what really shocked me the most was the attitude of the newly created Ministry of Environment. The current government made this creation a mayor piece of their strategy emphasizing the importance of environmental protection and affairs. Great, I thought. However, their statement yesterday led me to think that they seem to have a very different understanding of what protecting the environment means compared to mine. For them, seemingly, putting in large infrastructure that hampers stream flow, alters flow regimes and transfers water from one river to the next (or from groundwater to rivers, as more than 100 pumping stations were originally also planned to supply the river with water as it didn’t have enough water for the transfer…) are not actions that affect the environment, ecosystems or biodiversity. I wonder, what then is? Ah, and did I mention that this happening in the central part of a protected area? With less than 1% of the surface area of Uruguay under protection and most of it in the hands of private landowners, there isn’t really a lot of protection happening. I wondered what knock-on effects these kinds of backings have. If the Ministry is allowing this kind of infrastructure (and we are seeing many examples also of construction in coastal areas or private luxury residences being allowed to be constructed in beautiful places), what does this mean for the next-door farmer? Can he then just chop down the native forest and plant soy in the floodplain, since apparently, the floodplain we are on is not a WETLAND??? Now, this last comment really ticked me off. The director of the environmental monitoring department really said that floodplains aren’t wetlands. I would really like to send him back to University to a Biology 101 course. So sad, and these are the top-notch people they have. Really?

So, now I wonder what comes next. Working with the local NGOs that are fighting the new water pumping station (Neptuno project in Arazati) does give me hope. Three laws suits are currently ongoing and in one of them a small victory was achieved ten days ago. So, maybe a lawsuit? But as I mentioned before in one of my other blogs and articles, I have written in the last 9 months, environmental lawyers are rather scarce and all the good one’s sit in the ministries. Being involved in these initiatives that also bring local scientists to the forefront is good and inspiring, however, I am not always in agreement with how the information is presented. I am missing the scientific rigour. I hear a lot of opinions but have seen little hard, peer-reviewed evidence – mind you there are some very good and hard pieces of evidence out there, I have just not always seen them in these speeches. This makes it hard for me to distinguish between personal opinion and scientific evidence that is presented by the speakers. Scientists here also are very careful (or biased?) about what the scientific output that they are part of eventually says. I have been trained that the method needs to be rigorous. This might even disprove your hypothesis. You can always put your results into context by questioning your methods, but not by questioning your results. If the results don’t suit your hypothesis this is actually considered as good and interesting, it may mean that your view may have been biased. I am not sure I am encountering this mindset in (all) my colleagues here, which I find challenging. We can, and should, have an opinion as people and even as scientists, but when giving a scientific answer this should be based in evidence rather than personal opinion, I think.

Lastly, I have been thinking and working a lot about our current world and its situation. Our resources base is getting depleted ever more. Many of the planetary boundaries are overstepped. And, maybe worst of all, we still think it’s OK to think about nature, ecosystems, ad biodiversity as being there to service us. We talk about ecosystem services and how we need to take care of ecosystems so that our systems don’t break down, our water services, our energy production or food supply. But we don’t allow “nature” to just exist for the heck of being. We don’t give nature the ‘honour to exist’. At least, we think we are being good to nature because we are trying to optimize our system to use less resources (water saving devices, energy efficient supplies, no throw away plastics, etc.), or the “more right” resources (renewable energy versus fossil fuels, electric vehicles versus conventional ones, organic food versus conventional production, etc.). But honestly, we are a lot of people and still growing, our demands are shifting towards more consumption and not less (changing diets, rebound effects, clothing market, food waste, etc.). We can optimize as much as we want, we will just not make it. We will not be able to provide water, energy and/or food security to the growing population. The earths carrying capacity is just not meant to hold all of us with the lifestyle we have, and others want. In my Biology 101 classes I was taught that once a population exceeds its habitats carrying capacity, populations are regulated by decreasing natalities and increasing fatalities. The latter mostly through starvation, diseases and wars. I wonder.

In the meantime, Ron and I will take a break from life and take a 2-week tour through Uruguay visiting some of its protected areas. Wish us luck, most of the north is currently flooded.