Sowing Water, Sowing the Future in the High Mountains of Peru

The pickup truck stopped and I knew it was time to get out. Following the advice of the “water guardian” I had just met, I opened the door and waited a few seconds before exiting. I breathed in the dense mountain air and stepped down carefully. I had walked only a few meters before I felt in my body the weight of more than 4,500 meters (14,760 feet) of altitude. I paused for a moment, a little dizzy, waiting for the vertigo to pass.

None of that kept me from standing there, taking in the landscape. Before me stretched the Andean mountains of Peru, imposing and silent. As I looked out over the scene, I thought it was probably the highest place I had ever reached in my life—and I wondered whether the Lincoln Institute had ever reached so high….

Yet the altitude was only the beginning of the story.

Imagining the Future of a Sub-Basin

The mountain visit took place the day before a workshop on water resilience in the Santa Eulalia sub-basin, many meters lower down. The gathering was part of a process that had been unfolding for several months that seeks to strengthen capacity across Latin America and the Caribbean to imagine and prepare for uncertain futures in the context of water.

The tool behind that exercise is exploratory scenario planning (XSP): Rather than betting on a single predictable or desirable future, XSP sets out to navigate a range of uncertain futures and then return to the present to design strategies accordingly.

Santa Eulalia is one of five cases that make up this regional initiative, led by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy through its Consortium for Scenario Planning and its land and water program, the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Local implementation was carried out by Aquafondo, the Water Fund for Lima and Callao, an organization that promotes water security through nature-based solutions and collaboration among multiple stakeholders.

Over two days, members of rural communities, authorities, organizations, and other local stakeholders worked together to imagine different future scenarios for the basin, built around the driving forces participants considered most critical in terms of their uncertainty and impact. What would this sub-basin look like amid frequent, intense climate impacts and political instability? The group working on the most adverse scenario asked that question, titling the scenario “My dear Santa Eulalia, you are dying—where will we sing the hualinas…?” Hualinas are traditional Peruvian songs that pay tribute to water.

Despite the differences among scenarios, certain answers came up again and again, aligning with three broad ideas.

First Idea: Caring for Natural and Ancestral Infrastructure

The first idea concerned the need to strengthen the natural and ancestral water infrastructures that for centuries have made it possible to manage water in the mountains. Here, the amunas took center stage.

The amunas are channels built in the upper reaches of the mountains that capture rainwater during the wet season and carry it across permeable terrain, where it slowly infiltrates the subsoil. Months later, in the dry season, that same water resurfaces lower down, just when it is needed most. It is a system as simple as it is ingenious, inherited from pre-Hispanic times and preserved from generation to generation. The practice is known as “sowing and harvesting water”: You sow when water is abundant so you can harvest it when it is scarce.

Its impact is no small thing. Estimates say one kilometer of amuna contributes around 148,000 cubic meters (39 million gallons) of water per year, according to Aquafondo’s monitoring studies, and to date about 87 kilometers (54 miles) of amunas have been restored. But perhaps most revealing is that the water sown in the mountains does not stay there: It travels through the subsoil and can reach much farther, even to the cities.

Second Idea: Recovering and Passing on Knowledge

The second idea addressed the importance of recovering, making visible, and passing on the knowledge tied to these practices, through educational and cultural programs.

This idea struck me as especially powerful. Because what is not made visible is rarely valued. And what is not valued is rarely passed on to new generations. When that knowledge is lost, not only do specific techniques or practices disappear—so does a way of understanding the territory, of relating to water, and of building resilience.

This is not an isolated intuition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself, in its report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, recognizes that Indigenous and local knowledge offers valuable understanding for acting on climate risk and can enrich adaptation policies and practices. In the amunas, that principle becomes tangible: A body of knowledge more than 1,000 years old proves to be a concrete tool for adapting to water uncertainty today.

Third Idea: Financing What the Mountain Gives Us

The third idea was to design financing mechanisms to restore and maintain these ecosystems—and this, in a way, is where the whole effort is decided. Amunas and bofedales do not maintain themselves: they need hands to restore them and resources that make that work possible year after year. The question underlying every idea raised in the workshop was the same: who pays for the infrastructure that makes water possible, and how do those resources reach the people who keep it functioning?

There is no single answer, and that is why it is worth exploring—from land-based financing instruments to voluntary conservation mechanisms. This is exactly the intersection where the Lincoln Institute works: tying together how land is used, governed, and financed, so that caring for a territory and paying for that care stop being two separate decisions.

Water connects everything. The water that reaches Lima is born in the mountains, and as long as that link goes unrecognized, those who care for the sources high up will keep sustaining, almost in silence, the water supply of millions downstream. The challenge is for these mechanisms to reach the communities that care for water in the highlands, without being diluted along the way.

The True Height

Today, back in my own city, just a few meters above sea level, I still remember that dizziness I felt in the mountains. But when I think about this trip, the altitude is no longer what matters most.

What stays with me is the image of communities that came together to imagine their collective future and, in doing so, recognized the value of knowledge accumulated over generations. Perhaps that was the true height reached during those days: not the 4,500 meters above sea level, but the conversation that reached places where the future is rarely considered collectively, and where knowledge of the past still offers answers to the challenges of tomorrow. As one community member put it, with a simplicity that stayed with me: “We often believe the past was better, but we are the ones who can make the future even better.”

Melinda Maldonado is an Argentina-based lawyer with a PhD in Urban Studies, specializing in urban finance, climate change, and urban-environmental conflicts. She has extensive experience as a researcher, lecturer, and consultant across both the public and private sectors. A collaborator with the Lincoln Institute’s Latin America and Caribbean Program since 2010, she teaches courses on climate change and urban law. Her work currently focuses on land value capture as a means of financing climate measures, particularly nature-based solutions.

Lead image: Members of the Lincoln Institute and Aquafondo teams walk along the amunas (high-altitude rainwater channels) at around 4,500 meters above sea level in the Andes of Peru. The two organizations recently ran a scenario planning workshop focused on water resilience in the Santa Eulalia sub-basin. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.