Can Exploratory Scenario Planning Help Latin American Communities Solve Their Water Challenges? 

Toncontín Airport in Honduras—which sits squeezed inside the city limits of Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital, itself nestled into a valley and surrounded by mountains—has long been one of the world’s most difficult and dangerous major airports to fly into. So in late 2016, Honduras began construction on a new airport at a former air base 50 miles northwest of the capital, with longer runways and a less treacherous approach.

When the new Palmerola International Airport opened in 2021 outside the small city of La Paz, it led to an explosion of nearby development. And that’s putting more pressure on the area’s already-strained water system.

Between an influx of residents moving closer to the airport and the new businesses and industries that have sprung up nearby, “there is exponential urban growth,” explains Alfredo Stein, a former lecturer in urban development planning at the University of Manchester who is now a Honduras-based executive board member with the Institute for International Urban Development (I2UD).

In April, I2UD, together with the Association for the Integrated Management of Watersheds of La Paz and Comayagua and other nonprofits, and with support from the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Land and Water programs, hosted an exploratory scenario planning workshop in La Paz with a few dozen community members, private businesses, and local officials. A primary goal of the workshop was to strengthen collaborative water governance throughout the interconnected water system—from the headwaters of the upper basin to the urban neighborhoods below.

Even before the increase in water usage generated by the new airport and the resulting urban sprawl, city residents of the lower basin, which includes La Paz, only had running water for part of the day due to water supply shortages and inadequate infrastructure, explains Giovanni Pérez Macías, who helped facilitate the workshop. Meanwhile, the more rural upper basin—which is the source of much of the area’s water—is increasingly being cultivated for coffee production. Agriculture is a major driver of the Honduran economy, but it’s also a land use that can deplete and contaminate water supplies.

As in many places with interdependent rural-urban water systems, the watershed is managed by a patchwork of authorities—in this case, mostly local and neighborhood-led water boards—who are doing their best to serve their own communities. “The people in the lower part, they’re not fully aware of the complexities of conserving and producing water on the upper hill, and sometimes they’re not willing to contribute to cover the costs of producing this water that comes to the city,” Stein says. “So the idea of the workshop is to bridge this gap between the upper and lower basins.”

The two regions of the basin share similar challenges of “governability, climate change, technical issues, and financing,” says Alejandra Mortarini, vice president of I2UD. “The problem is, there is no money in the upper part, so somebody has to pay to cross-finance the work that people are doing in the upper basin.”

Given the impact the new airport is having on the region, Stein wonders if a per-passenger fee—something Costa Rica has had success with, he says—could help fund water quality management, conservation, and infrastructure. Or perhaps coffee producers and urban businesses could be persuaded to pay more for a guarantee of continuous water service.

“If they want to continue operating, and they will need water, there has to be a certain local fund that is established for the maintenance of this water producing process,” Stein says. “Is that going to be a levy, a tax? Municipal law in Honduras allows for a lot of these financial alternatives to take place.”

The workshops also explored long-term strategies to ensure greater resilience to climate risks. “The demand for water has increased quite dramatically, and this is happening in the context of severe climate impacts,” Stein adds—from more frequent dry spells to heavier rains that cause flooding. “So we have water stress, increased water demand, dwindling of water sources, dramatic land use change, wildfires, population explosion—those are the issues that this scenario planning workshop aims to address.”

The organizers (other partners included Habitat for Humanity Honduras and Goal Honduras) held a series of pre-workshops leading up to the April session to help community members identify a set of driving forces and future scenarios for attendees to contemplate together in more detail. The exploratory scenario planning framework helped create a supportive environment for conversations that can be uncomfortable, Pérez Macías says. “Talking about the future of a community turns out to be super common ground… It’s something that we all share.” Indeed, one of the scenarios was titled “Soñar no cuesta nada,” or “To dream costs nothing.”

By the end of the one-and-a-half-day April workshop, “something really amazing happened,” Pérez Macías says.

“You always have the risk that the final strategies are kind of out of reach of the community,” he explains. “Like, ‘We need a new national law,’ or ‘We need $10 million.’ So we ask them to think of strategies that are within their control. And that’s what happened: They decided that the very first strategy was to keep this group of people talking about water, and to try to build a local water board with different representatives from the upper basin, lower basin, NGOs, and government and economic clusters from the region.”

It’s that kind of tangible outcome that can make scenario planning such an effective tool for communities facing complex and interconnected challenges, says Heather Hannon, director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. As a community visioning exercise, “It’s designed to invite new ways of thinking about the future, but also to spur meaningful action and commitments in the present,” she says.

The La Paz workshop was one of five projects focused on using exploratory scenario planning (XSP) to meet water challenges in Latin America selected for support through the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning and Latin America and the Caribbean program.

“Across Latin America and the Caribbean, communities are navigating growing pressures around water, land use, climate variability, and governance,” says Kristen Keener Busby, associate director of program implementation for the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. “One of the most valuable aspects of these workshops has been creating space for diverse stakeholders to explore uncertainty together while identifying practical, locally grounded pathways toward long-term resilience.”

The other four selected projects, also getting underway, include:

• A consortium of researchers from Bogota, Colombia, are using the exploratory scenario planning framework to address climate, environmental, and land use pressures on Laguna de Suesca in Suesca, Colombia, and inform the lagoon’s management plan, strengthen collaboration between communities and the environmental authority, and develop scalable approaches for resilient governance.
• In Mexico, the Instituto de Planeación y Gestión del Desarrollo del Área Metropolitana de Guadalajara (IMEPLAN) is running an XSP process focused on flood risks to improve stormwater management and strengthen resilience, culminating in the implementation of a long-term flood management plan for the metro area.
• Aquafondo, based in Lima, Peru, will bring together communities in the Santa Eulalia sub-basin to codevelop future scenarios for water governance and territorial management and identify long-term approaches to strengthen water resilience throughout the basin amidst institutional uncertainty and a changing climate.
• Addressing increasing water scarcity in Argentina’s Mendoza River Basin, CONICET Mendoza, in coordination with local water user organizations, will employ XSP to foster participatory decision-making for equitable and sustainable water management across competing uses.

Learn more about Lincoln Institute RFPs, fellowships, and research opportunities.

Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Aerial night skyline of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, from El Picacho Park. Credit: Leonid Andronov via Getty Images.