Circular Country | Downstream Indifference

Last week, we witnessed a perfect storm in the Maipo River wetland. The weakened river flow, due to climate change and upstream extraction, failed to break through a sandbar fed by strong surges, forcing authorities—with the collaboration of conservation managers—to open a ditch to evacuate the accumulated water to the sea and prevent flooding in surrounding communities.

It’s paradoxical that, in a context of environmental crisis, historic drought, and extreme weather events, the green infrastructure par excellence that helps us mitigate these effects is the one that bears the brunt. Today, wetlands (some of them urban) appear to be a nice carpet under which the public-private partnership’s inability to agree on integrated watershed management is hidden.

Water is our lifeblood and that of nature. What happened on the Maipo River should be a warning sign to take action and add the ecosystem layer to the current political and administrative territorial planning and move toward an integrated model based on water, so that water resource management ensures human consumption, economic activities, and biodiversity conservation. Today, the scales are not balanced, and indifference, as we witnessed, is running downstream.