Hydrological bases for the Natural Resources Conservation in the Lake Moa catchment, Bolivia

Abstract

Water is life and knowing the availability of this resource and even more in possible climate change scenarios, is essential to guarantee sustainable development and especially the conservation of natural resources of vulnerable rural populations located really far from urban areas, such as the Tacana Native Indigenous region of the north of La Paz department, with emphasis on the sub-basins around the Botanical Garden implemented by the DINA/UMSA and in the Moa Lake basin, the second largest lake in the department of La Paz, which tends to dry up in dry periods. For the water resources evaluation, two meteorological stations were installed and river flow measurements has been done on a monthly basis from October 2018 to September 2019 and the hydrological models SWAT (Soil & Water Assessment Tools) and WEAP (Water Evaluation & Planning) were applied. Once the hydrological basin models were built, most of them were calibrated and validated, in a preliminary way, except for only two basins, which obtained a Nash coefficient of less than 0,5. On this basis, we proceeded to simulate the availability of water in climate change scenarios, showing a tendency to decrease the flows and the sensitivity of this region to climate change, as well as the hydrological response of Lake Moa itself to temporal inflows. This studies should make it possible to declare the basins as protection areas, to stop and prevent forest exploitation and, on the contrary, to promote hydro-eco-productive activities and ecosystem protection, facilitating in the short term an Integrated Water Resource Management strategy based on the results obtained in this research work.