Latin America; in English (pdf) - Transboundary Freshwater Dispute ...

Micro-hydropower turbine and generator, part of a pilot project to install a renewable-energy “mini-grid” for the remote village of Cachoeira do
Aruã in Brazil, 145 km from Santarém up a tributary of the Amazon. Photo credit: Indalma Industria/Nazareno Natalino/USAID.
contact with the communities and help alleviate
poverty in the basin, then ALT can be a true
model for institutional management of an
international basin. The organization is only nine
years old and it will take much longer to make
change happen in a region in such a difficult
situation, but there is hope as ALT improves that
more sustainable methods of management will
be attained.
Red bellied piranha, Amazon. Photo credit: Iva Nafzinger.
3.4 CONCLUSIONS
As long as water is shared between two or more
countries or a basin has two or more stakeholders,
the potential for conflict will exist. South
America’s international waters, though abundant,
do not escape from this reality. Under the current
state of affairs, the continent is susceptible to any
number of occurrences that would stress the water
situation further. A promising future exists for the
region, however, as more institutions are created
to confront the issues that are emerging.
South America is unique in that it has an
abundance of water resources, but with a lower
population density than other continents;
therefore, the amount of water per capita is the
highest in the world. This exists to an even greater
extent in the South America’s international river
basins, where the average amount of available
water per capita is over 36,000 m 3 (TFDD 2004),
much higher than the world average. This is
mainly due to the amount of water that is in the
Amazon River, which is the world’s largest river in
terms of quantity of discharge, but has a relatively
low population within the basin.
74 — Hydropolitical Vulnerability and Resilience along International Waters: Latin America and the Caribbean