Protecting Xalapa's Water: Sustainable Management Of

PROTECTING XALAPA’S WATER: SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF THE PIXQUIAC RIVER WATERSHED IN VERACUZ, MEXICO, 2005–2015 SYNOPSIS In 2005, civic leaders in Xalapa, Mexico, sought to curb deforestation and unsustainable farming practices in the nearby Pixquiac watershed that threatened the quality and availability of water in their city. Xalapa’s 400,000 residents relied on the watershed—a 10,727-hectare area that channeled water into the Pixquiac River—to provide almost 40% of their water supply. SENDAS, a small nongovernmental organization, created a program that aimed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Pixquiac watershed by paying landowners to conserve and restore the watershed’s forests. The program also helped farmers adopt more-efficient production methods and increase their incomes. By building partnerships with the municipal water commission, the state government, the National Forestry Commission, and Mexico’s largest environmental foundation, SENDAS secured sustained financing for the program. The organization also assembled a management committee with broad representation to ensure that funds were distributed appropriately and transparently. By 2015, environmental leaders were hoping to replicate SENDAS’s success in other important watersheds across the state of Veracruz. Blair Cameron drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Xalapa, Mexico, in March and April, 2015. Case published January 2016. INTRODUCTION watershed, home of 7,150 people and nearly 60% “Water is a very sensitive topic in Xalapa,” forested,1 was under threat from new said Sergio Beauregard, who was with the construction, unsustainable farming practices, and municipal water commission in Xalapa, the capital illegal logging. city of Veracruz state in Mexico. “Every year The rest of Xalapa’s water supply came there is a problem of water shortages, and there mostly from the Huitzilapan watershed, which are water restrictions for several months.” spread from Veracruz into the neighboring state During the early 2000s, that water problem of Puebla. Inhabitants of the Huitzilapan had a grew steadily worse, and the need to address the tense relationship with the Veracruz state city’s water security concerns rose higher on the government and the Xalapa municipal council civic agenda. because landowners in the watershed felt they The nearby Pixquiac River watershed were not being adequately compensated for supplied nearly 40% of the water that Xalapa’s supplying the city’s water. In March 2006, 70 400,000 residents used. The 10,727-hectare protesters from the region protested in Xalapa, ISS is a joint program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice: successfulsocieties.princeton.edu. ISS invites readers to share feedback and information on how these cases are being used: [email protected]. © 2015, Trustees of Princeton University Blair Cameron Innovations for Successful Societies demanding the city pay for a new school and challenging task: to design and implement a plan hospital for their community.2 Beauregard said to protect the watershed’s resources for the residents of the Huitzilapan regularly blocked the foreseeable future. With research grants from the water supply. “They shut down the dam, National Council of Science and Technology, the demanding resources and public works from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and municipality of Xalapa and the state of Veracruz,” the Overbrook Foundation, SENDAS and its he said. academic partners began to develop a strategy. As Xalapa grew, so did the risk that property developers would remove the trees that helped THE CHALLENGE maintain the region’s clean water. Without the The SENDAS researchers first analyzed the soil conditions and filtration that the trees and economic pressures that affected land use in their roots provided, fertilizer and dairy runoff different parts of the watershed. “In the lower flowed into the water. Although total forest cover watershed, the urban areas were growing a lot in the watershed had increased since the 1970s, without planning,” said Georgina Vidriales, one landowners and outsiders were still cutting timber of three director-coordinators at the NGO. to make way for new buildings and roads. Developers had cut down both primary forest Farmers cleared land to plant potatoes and create and coffee trees grown by the previous owners, pastures for dairy cows. thereby clearing the way for new housing and Protecting the Pixquiac watershed was businesses. “There was also a problem of sewage difficult because doing so required cooperation and dead animals” polluting the water in the among private landowners, farmers who managed lower watershed, she said. their land communally, and several levels of The middle watershed, where the cloud government. The watershed spanned four forest was located, had its own particular separate municipalities: urban and rural problems. As the name suggested, this forest was jurisdictions equivalent to counties in some characterized by high humidity and persistent countries. No public agency, regional low-lying clouds. The ecosystem was particularly commission, or watershed association had important to protect because of the wide range of authority to provide leadership. In addition, native plant and animal species it supported. But sustainability was subject to the vagaries of farmers who owned or rented land in this zone municipal officeholders who usually served three- had started to cut trees for firewood and to create year terms. space for potato crops. They also applied In 2005, a nongovernmental organization pesticides that polluted waterways. (NGO), Senderos y Encuentros para un In the upper watershed, the biggest problem Desarrollo Autónomo Sustentable (SENDAS), was illegal logging. “There is a highly organized decided to take action. The NGO had been part local mob, and they have a system of of a coalition of landowners, civic groups, deforestation,” Vidriales said. “They invade with scholars, and citizens that had united to block the their trucks, cut, and leave.” federal government’s plan to build a highway Working in the upper watershed was through the watershed. Arguing that the road and especially difficult because property ownership related work threatened the water supply and was unclear across much of the forested area. would damage the environment, the groups had “There was a very big area that was like a no- succeeded in halting the project. man’s-land,” said Tajín Fuentes, another The leaders of SENDAS wanted to organize coordinator at SENDAS. “In the 1950s, the the same coalition to carry out a far more owners of the land, mostly rich families from © 2015, Trustees of Princeton University Terms of use and citation format appear at the end of this document and at successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/about/terms-conditions. 2 Blair Cameron Innovations for Successful Societies Ejidos in Mexico Following the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the federal government of Mexico created ejidos to distribute land to poor peasants in rural areas. Several thousand ejidos were created across the country through 1991, with most ejidatarios (ejido members) tilling individually allotted plots. Ejidos also set aside larger areas for shared use. Every three years, ejidatarios voted on a leader, known as the commissary, as well as a secretary and a treasurer. The three elected representatives collectively governed the ejido and presided over community assemblies every one to three months, at which ejidatarios made collective decisions regarding the use of communal land, decisions about economic opportunities, and resolution of community concerns. In 1992, the Mexican government halted the creation of new ejidos and established a two-step mechanism by which plots of ejido land could be converted to private property. The first step, called the Certification Program for Ejido Rights and Titles (known as PROCEDE, an acronym based on its name in Spanish), enabled ejidos to formalize titles for individual plots of land owned by their members. After the land-titling process, ejidos could choose to undertake a further step called dominio pleno (a freehold), which allowed ejidatarios to make independent decisions on what to do with their land. Xalapa, clear cut the forest to sell the wood and their organizational structure,” Vidriales said. then abandoned the properties. That was 40 or 50 “The way they used to organize ejido life and years ago, so now the forests have recovered, but make decisions, the way they used to rule the the land tenure is unclear.” land, was lost. And the people started to sell the Diversity in the underlying cause of plots of land.” Other ejidos, mainly in the upper deforestation made it harder to frame a coherent watershed, maintained their traditional structure protection strategy, but that was not the only and continued to make collective decisions about challenge the SENDAS team identified. A second how to manage their land. one arose from the disparate types of ownership Creating positive relationships with systems in the watershed. Although most of the landowners was critical in order to avoid the land was owned individually, some was held tensions that had led communities in the communally, as ejidos (See Ejidos in Mexico text Huitzilapan watershed to block Xalapa’s access to box.) Ejidos distributed plots to their members, water sources. The SENDAS team worried that a called ejidatarios, and some also reserved

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