Water Works for Latin American Progress

Water has been an essential resource and a precious commodity, and ensuring availability and use has been one of the primary tasks of civilizations and societies throughout history.

This vital need has led humans to learn to manage the resource, devising building techniques to ensure availability, successfully resolving the cyclical seasonality of water in nature and allowing for a better use until reaching the current levels of development, progress and well-being.

Water works or infrastructures are those developed in the field of civil engineering for water management, mainly pursuing two main objectives: use and defense against surplus.

One of the most effective measures to cover periods of scarcity and to control water surplus is to build water infrastructure for storage, regulation and flow leveling, i.e. dams and reservoirs. When well planned and managed, these structures are essential to ensure social and environmental well-being.

In our historical context, we can only understand current societies and many of the existing environmental ecosystems through the regulation of rivers and natural waterways. This agenda is implemented through the construction of dams and the creation of water reservoirs. Dams should be regarded as a source of wealth that facilitates availability of water resources, an invaluable asset which, in other circumstances, would hardly be usable.

In addition, these infrastructures promote the use of water for all types of agri-food and industrial processes, and promote hydropower, which is not only the largest source of renewable energy worldwide, but is also decisive like no other source for the operation of energy systems and the energy decarbonization process that the Latin American energy matrix must undertake.

But it does not end there. The regulation of rivers, through dam management, is a decisive tool from the public safety standpoint, as these are extremely effective infrastructures in the defense and protection against floods and their subsequent pernicious effects. In the face of increasingly frequent and fierce water-based natural events, dams help prevent the loss of human lives and economic damage each year, thanks to their mitigating action in case of floods.

At CAF—development bank of Latin America—we are working on these issues from several fronts. One is the training of public officials, an essential task to ensure efficiency, planning and good performance of projects. In this sense, we created the free open online course “Design, Use and Safety of Dams and Reservoirs”.

This training has been jointly designed by experts from CAF and the Spanish Committee of Large Dams (SPANCOLD), and provides a unified view of the fundamental criteria for the optimal design and proper management of these infrastructures, with special emphasis on the most relevant technical and regulatory criteria, in order to ensure a safe and effective operation. Key issues are addressed, such as factory dams and loose materials, spillways and drainage, dam safety, sediment management or energy dissipation structures.

Latin America needs this type of infrastructure to continue to improve well-being. We firmly hope that these types of training, which focuses on medium- and long-term structural agendas, will be a useful tool in achieving the long-overdue full development of our region.