Climate Change, Water, and the Future of San Miguel
Our Water Crisis Affects Us All: Climate Change, Water Cycles, and the Future of Our City
This is the fourth in a month-long series bringing you different stories regarding the urban side of our water crisis through the lens of the people who are living it here in San Miguel.
We recently spoke extensively with Fabián Trejo, Technical Advisor in Tourism and Climate Change for the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ, by its acronym in German), a federal enterprise that directly supports the German Government’s objectives specifically related to international cooperation for sustainable development. Over the last several years, Trejo and GIZ have been working in San Miguel de Allende through their initiative – Adaptur, which seeks to promote natural solutions for climate change adaptation in the tourism sector. San Miguel was one of three pilot destinations selected by GIZ throughout Mexico, along with the Riviera Maya and Riviera Nayarit-Puerto Vallarta. All three sites were chosen due to their social, economic, and environmental relevance for the tourism sector and the unique challenges they face in relation to the potential impacts of climate change.
Photo: Fabián Trejo, Technical Advisor in Tourism and Climate Change for GIZ Mexico.
Our Water Crisis and Climate Change
The Upper Río Laja Watershed stretches across seven municipalities in the northern part of Guanajuato State and includes San Miguel de Allende and more than 2,800 urban and rural communities. The quantity and quality of the water supply within our watershed is not only being severely impacted by the overexploitation of our finite groundwater resources by the agro-exporting industry, it is also being increasingly threatened by climate change, which is directly connected to the disruption of water cycles in our region. As such, the increasing temperature in the region has created a considerable decrease in annual precipitation, making the rainy season shorter and the dry season longer. When the rain does fall, we will tend to receive fewer, shorter, but much more intense rain events. We need to prepare for the results of climate change or we will be facing flooding and landslides that no doubt will have detrimental economic impacts on everybody living in San Miguel, including the tourism sector.
These kinds of disruptions are exacerbating the water scarcity issues in our region. Further, the drier it gets, the deeper we are forced to drill our wells in order to reach the water necessary to support daily life. At these depths, our water is increasingly contaminated with naturally-occurring chemicals such as arsenic and fluoride. Arsenic and fluoride are related to a host of serious health threats when consumed continuously over time. Most of which are chronic and irreversible, such as: dental and skeletal fluorosis (teeth become stained brown and bones become brittle and deformed), chronic kidney disease, skin lesions, cognitive developmental issues in children, and several types of cancer.
We invite you to click the link below to read our full interview with Fabián Trejor of GIZ Mexico, and learn more about how climate change, tourism, and water are all connected as well as the actions we can take to create a more sustainable future for San Miguel and our region.
Thanks to the work of people like Fabián Trejo, we can proactively take action to mitigate the climate and water crises affecting urban as well as rural communities in our region. But there is no time to lose and we must act now. That is why we’ve decided to launch our new Urban Education Initiative in San Miguel this fall. We will be expanding our urban water monitoring, developing and delivering new educational workshops by neighborhood, organizing residents, building model urban solutions, and more, all in an effort to help people better understand and navigate this crisis. Please join us and help us get this critical initiative off the ground by making a donation today
By donating today you will be making an important contribution to helping us restore the environmental balance in San Miguel de Allende, a city that belongs to the world but that’s home to a precious community that we cannot afford to abandon.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at: info@caminosdeagua.org or simply reply to this email. Thank you.