In October 2012, the American Chemical Society's Global Innovation Imperatives (GII) program sponsored a forum to assess water-quality challenges facing Chocont�, Cundinamarca, Colombia. During field trips and workshops, stakeholders and scientists joined to identify problems, suggest mitigation, and develop a management plan to mitigate potential adverse effects of changing population, land use, and climate on water quality.  Chocont� lies in the headwaters of the R�o Bogot� at an elevation of 2655 meters above sea level. With a mean annual temperature of 13 degrees Celsius and a mean annual precipitation of 900 millimeters, the quantity of water available is more than sufficient to support the population of 17,000. A municipal treatment plant provides water to those living in town. Twenty-nine river intakes feed water to rural households. Unfortunately, much of the rural water distribution system has fallen into disrepair; there is a shortage of trained individuals to maintain the infrastructure and test the water supply to insure that it is potable.  Short-term mitigation efforts to protect water quality include fencing of riparian corridors, training technicians for proper system maintenance, closing of intakes during the first hours of a large runoff event, and boiling water for human consumption. At a slightly longer time horizon, tanneries should be encouraged to relocate to municipal industrial parks, where the costs for waste treatment and quality assurance can be shared. Ammoniated polymers derived from locally produced tannins may offer an economical alternative to alum for flocculating toxic metals and anions in the waste stream. Longer term solutions include the protection of the cloud forests and paran�s that filter copious amounts of precipitation high above the valley, and the use of both conceptual and numerical watershed models to select effective management actions given different scenarios of future population, land use, and climate.

Tanneries to cloud forests: Water quality issues and solutions for Chocont�, Cundinamarca, Colombia

248th National Meeting (2014)

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