The Nature Conservancy - Ecuador

Sanitation is critical for achieving water security objectives. Lack of sanitation and wastewater treatment cause serious challenges for people and nature. We want to design a decentralized sanitation system using constructed wetlands to manage wastewater coming from a rural community, compare to a traditional sewage system and implement a demonstrative pilot on-site. We will work with the Paute Water Fund [1] (FONAPA) to incorporate sanitation in it’s Strategic Plan and escalate the case to the local Government. By scaling this case we will address health, development and the environment while contributing to SDG 6[2].

[1] Water Funds (WFs) are collective action mechanisms that bring different stakeholders together with a common purpose of improving water security in their watershed.

[2] This project relates directly to at least 4 cross-sector Sustainable Development Goals. 1: end poverty (1.4 goal); 6: Clean water and sanitation (6.3 and 6.6 goals), 15: Terrestrial ecosystems (15.1 goal) and 3: Health and wellbeing (3.3).

Sanitation in water sources is critical for achieving water security objectives. More than 80% of global wastewater from human activities is poured into rivers without treatment[1], causing serious challenges for people and nature. Almost half of the world’s population (4.5 million billon) lacks sanitation, generating water-borne diseases that generate major challenges, especially in low-income populations.

In Ecuador, the drinking water of 20.7% of the population is contaminated by E coli., and 24% of the children in the country suffer from chronic malnutrition[2] mainly caused by parasites and bacteria from contaminated water. Untreated wastewater strongly impacts freshwater biodiversity as well, leading to almost 6% loss of native fish and macroinvertebrate species[3]. Polluted water is linked to downstream eutrophication of surface waters that can eliminate pollution-sensitive macroinvertebrate and significantly reduce biodiversity[4]. Rural communities in the region lack of adequate sanitation in Ecuador (more than 55% of the population[5] ), being far from centralized systems. In Ecuador, Municipalities are responsible for delivering sanitation services, but are far from addressing this issue. Rural communities need to innovative, low-cost, robust and efficient alternatives that can manage wastewater coming from households

[1] UN, 2018; WWAP, 2017

[2] OMS /UNICEF, 2017; Rodriguez, 2014

[3] Weijters et al., 2009

[4] Grantham et al., 2012

[5] INEC; ENEMDU, 2019 - UNICEF courtesy.

• Design a decentralized system to manage wastewater in Carmen de Jadán (a rural community in the Andes), it will be compared with a traditional sewage system to showcase the benefits of working with nature-based-solutions. The design will incorporate the use of Constructed Wetlands (CW), with simple and efficient pre-treatment process, to reduce nutrients and biological diseases vectors of wastewater (which is a condition to guarantee good performance of CW).  Treated water may be incorporated into the river without being a hazard for ecological systems downstream and has other benefits e.g.: reuse for irrigation, reduce significative operational costs of water companies, integration in situ und using natural materials from the zone.
• Implement a small pilot to manage wastewater of one household as a demonstrative site in the community.

• Incorporate the idea of implementing in-situ sanitation in rural areas in the Strategic Plan of Paute Water Fund (especially in the headwaters with community settlements), to demonstrate applicability and generate information for other Water Funds in the region as a platform to achieve scalability. 

• Socialize this model with the local government, incorporating a discussion of the social, economic and environmental threats of untreated wastewater and lack of sanitation, to promote this system as a viable option for rural communities.

Improvements in the water access, sanitation and hygiene is traduced to the reduction of the presence of infectious and diarrheic diseases that mainly affect infants, the poor and people living in marginal or dispersed areas. Thus, the treatment of water is not only a matter of health, it also addresses poverty, economic inequality and territory-social injustice (SDC & UN-Habitat, 2007).

It is estimated that only 10% of residual urban waters are treated in countries of medium and low income (Dahane, 2016). This is exacerbated in Rural Areas where treatment of residual water is almost null. In Ecuador, 5,5 out of 10 people have a sewage system, with a vast gap in urban vs. rural areas especially in communities with less than 200 families (72.9% vs. 25.7% coverage respectively) (NDC Ecuador, 2019; ENEMDU, 2018). This breach has a direct relationship with poverty, where 43,0% of people in rural areas live in poverty conditions and 18,1% in extreme poverty (in contrast with the national average of 24,5% and 9,0% correspondingly) (ENEMDU, 2018).

Constructed wetlands have the potential to be a viable solution to increase access to safely managed sanitation services as a waste management in low income and rural areas because they are decentralized systems and less costly in construction, maintenance, and function compared to conventional treatment systems (Vymazal, 2010; Matovi et at., 2003; Cronk, 1996). They have no energy input need, or in the case of pumping it requires about 1,5kW/person/ year, about 20 times less that conventional systems.  

The Paute Watershed covers 6.436 km2 and is home to 298.209 rural habitants (46% of the total Paute population)[1]. Inadequate rural sanitation in this watershed has been identified as a key water security challenge for local communities[2]. The sanitation design will be made for the rural community in the Paute Watershed, in the Gualaceo Municipality, in a community called Carmen de Jadán, made up of 152 households (674 people). The principal production activities this community practices is agriculture and cattle ranching. They are highly organized in their internal governance model. Despite may of their cattle ranching practices involved burns in the past (impacting highly the forest which is their source of water), las last 2- 3 decades they have been working in cooperation with the local municipality and other institutions with the vision to protect their forest. Today this area is declared as a protected forest (Bosque protector Aguarongo) and the community continues to make efforts to restore wetlands and degraded areas that had previous impacts. According to the they have seen the difference of water availability that was scarce years ago, in contrast of today, where they count with uninterrupted provision all year long, including in  the dry season.

This community has been working with TNC and FONAPA for the last 7 years with conservation agreements to protect their ecosystems. The community leaders have directly manifested their concern about their wastewater management, because they consider it to be a persistent hazard to the community and wish to address this threat. Constructing a traditional sewage system is too costly because the community is far from other centralized systems in the urban areas and the households are scattered in the terrain, making that model expensive. This is part of the reasons why rural areas have low access to safely managed sanitation services, which is related with social aspects of poverty and inequality. That is why CWs is a less expensive alternative as a safe wastewater management alternative in places with little or no budget to ensure sanitation access to people.

[1] INEC, 2010

[2] PDO-T, 2010

The problem we are proposing, addresses the Resilient Ecosystems target:

• Preserve and restore carbon-rich ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots, whether terrestrial, coastal, or marine.
• Provide scalable and verifiable monitoring and data collection to track ecosystem conditions, such as biodiversity, carbon stocks, or productivity.
• Aggregate local projects to enable access to financial capital for ecosystem services such as natural hazard mitigation, water quality, and carbon storage.
• Create scalable economic opportunities for local communities, including fishing, timber, tourism, and regenerative agriculture, that are aligned with thriving and biodiverse ecosystems

Building a decentralize sanitation system needs a pre-study of the area, topography demography, area availability, to make a design of the system and calculate a more accurate budget. We want to develop the concept of implementing constructed wetlands in rural communities as a scalable model. For this, we need to bring the discussion to the table, and have an on-the-ground plan. We think that we can incentivize discussions with the local government and incorporate this activity in the water Fund Strategic Plan by starting with a strong concept.

By articulating the FONAPA Water Fund and the local government’s support and having a concise design of the sanitation and water treatment system, the next step will be to apply for bigger grants through a stronger proposal. This way we may have an opportunity of improving sanitation for Carmen de Jadán and continue learning community-based wastewater management, as a model to be replicated in the region through the local governments and Water Funds.

CWs have been implemented since in the 1950s and have evolved during the last five decades into a reliable treatment technology which can be applied to all types of wastewater including sewage, industrial and agricultural wastewaters, landfill leachate and stormwater runoff (Vymazal, 2010). We are aware that this solution is not innovative for many examples around the globe, nevertheless, it has been scarcely applied in the regions and the country. Hence, we can say it is innovative for Ecuador and the rural communities in the Andes that have no access to this technology.

Vertical CW are not complicated to build. CW use local materials and plants. They can absorbs 4 - 8 tons CO2 per hectare per year, use every little energy, is self-regulating to purify different pollutants, especially bacteria reduction  BOD, COD, Phosphates and Nitrogen.

Vertical CW has special Geo-Chemical filters to reduce phosphate and nitrogen 70-90%, (Prof. Maciej Zalefewsky, Pavel Jarosiewicy, Arnoldo Font Najera). And when build properly with Geo-chemical filters can initiate a drastic change fixing significantly environmental degradation due to pollution. This combination of a pre -treatment with catalyzer, CW vertical and Geo-chemical filterers in CW treatment is really new in the field of wastewater treatment.

One or two CWs can become a model for communities. The CWs are modular and allow an adaptation of up to 1000 inhabitants equivalents, with well-calculable costs including a team trained to reproduce a correct construction to guarantee operation and maintenance.

A common household in Carme de Jadán community houses about 7- 10 people. We will impact this small number with the implementation of this project through the CW for one household.

In the next year, through the socialization of the CW design of the entire community, we expect to achieve a major grant that can fund the implementation of the decentralized sanitation and wastewater treatment in this site. We will impact directly to 674 people living in Carmen de Jadán.

In the next five years, through the socialization of the pilot with the local government, and the integration of this solution in the strategic plan of FONAPA water fund, we think that we will be able to scale the application of CWs in at least 10 other communities that can directly serve about 5.000 people and at least  15.000 indirect beneficiaries downstream (thinking about at least 2-3 communities that will have better water quality). These people will be improving their livelihoods by lowering inequalities with access to an improved sanitation.

We will expect that the incorporation of CWs will:

• Reduce wastewater pollution from human practices in water bodies, decrease N, P, BODs and bacterial inputs.
• Improve river integrity and presence of good water quality bioindicators.
• Improve the livelihoods of people in the community, reduce inequalities of sanitation access.  
• Reduce the rate of water-related diseases within the watershed.
  • Prüss-UstÜn et al. (2014) estimate that improvements in these systems would have the potential to reduce the incidences of the diseases by 58%.

We will establish a baseline to measure biological, physical and chemical water quality parameters of the Gordeleg river (where direct discharges occur):

• Dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphates and total suspended solids as Physic-chemical parameters.
• Ecological integrity of the river by assessing the state of the river and by monitoring macroinvertebrates as bioindicators. We will use the “Protocol for the Evaluation of the Ecological Integrity of Rivers in the Austral Region of Ecuador”[1]
• Sanitation disposal coverage in the community as septic tanks or other minimal sanitation infrastructure.
• Cases of chronic diarrhea and malnutrition in children under 5 years old for the last 15 years or more (depending on the availability of information).

Apart of the project’s budget, the Gualaceo Municipality is willing to cooperate with monitoring expenses (we calculate a funding match of about $2000 – $3000 USD).

[1] R., Acosta & Hampel, Henrietta & H., González & Mosquera, Pablo & Sotomayor, Gonzalo & X., Galarza. (2014). Protocolo de Evaluación de la Integridad Ecológica de los Ríos de la Región Austral del Ecuador.

In total, the team will have 6 part-time people working together to develop the proposal.

• The Nature conservancy: 1 part-time staff with small salary percentages of administrative team.
• FONAPA: 2 part-time staff
• Contractor: 1 part-time staff
• Gualaceo municipality support: 2 part-time staff (match – not funded by grant)

The Nature Conservancy:

The Nature Conservancy is a global environmental nonprofit working to create a world where people and nature can thrive. Founded in the U.S. through grassroots action in 1951, The Nature Conservancy has grown to become one of the most effective and wide-reaching environmental organizations in the world, impacting conservation in 72 countries. In Ecuador, TNC has been impacting for more than 30 years. We fomr asmall team of 6 people (100% Ecuadorian) working for the conservation of our natural ecosystems and biodiversity. We are world references because the first Water fund was born in Quito- Ecuador in 2000 and TNC was part of the constituents that started this successful mechanism. We have supported the creation and operation of Water funds for more than 20 years. And we think we can potentiate the replication of CWs to treat wastewater through Water Funds in Latin America. Water Funds can be the right platform for replication because: they forge strong and long-lasting relationships with communities and landowners, and they have a clear understanding of the impacts, activities and social needs at a local context.  We think that that this experience can be shared with many of the other water in the region so that they can implement this practice in scale.

FONAPA:

The “Fund for the Protection of Paute Watershed (FONAPA)  It’s a regional water fund that works closely with key actors such as the Gualceo local government and local communities. During the last 12 years, resources have been invested in a series of projects related to the conservation and management of water resources in the Paute river basin. At present we are very interested in promoting projects that provide a solution to the contamination of water resources, because they cause diseases in the rural population and because they affect local aquatic biodiversity.

We hold good relations with the provincial government, knowledge of local management of the hydrographic basin, good relationship with the community and experience in implementing projects on site.

Hannes Poehlmann:

Constructued Wetslands expert, that has experience in constructed wetlands implementation in Andean communities in Ecuador; experience in the design of integral systems for sanitation and wastewater treatment, as well as the calculation of budget.

Applicated CW projects: Small systems for 1-3 families (4-20 Hab.) in Tumbaco, Quito and Guapolo. Big system in the Galápagos- Santa Cruz island, COPROPAG (80 Hab.) , and in  Isabella island ( 1400 Hab.). Have developed approximately 30 CWs of different sizes in the last 20 years in Ecuador. For more information visit www.caduceus.com or www.blumberg-engineers.com