2025 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

The population of Azuay perceives environmental problems: low quantity and quality of water, invasive vegetation, accelerated eutrophication, change of land use, etc. This, plus a set of socioeconomic difficulties, has an impact on the quality of life, exacerbating unemployment and migration.

The raison d'être of the project is the restoration of wetlands, with the aim of recovering their ecosystem services (water and climate regulation, mitigation of droughts and floods, natural resources, biodiversity, etc.). Social and governmental actors sign commitments to restore degraded wetlands.

To recover these environmental services, physical and biological rehabilitation techniques are applied, along with community awareness and participation to improve agricultural production practices and mitigate socioeconomic problems.

With specialized machinery and manually, invasive vegetation is extracted, which is used for handicrafts and raw material for fertilizer, and sediments are used in the protection strips of the lakes. Physical and biological barriers restrict the entry of pollutants.

The methodology and management model strengthen community capacities, considering that it is a dynamic ecosystem influenced by internal and external factors such as culture and climatic conditions that need to be balanced.

This holistic restoration methodology has never before been implemented in Azuay. To ensure sustainability, a community empowerment strategy is applied. During this process, there is evidence of a change in attitude among the population, who, seeing opportunities to improve their quality of life, are strengthening the productive activities derived from the recovery of lakes (handicrafts with totora reeds, ecotourism, silvopastoral practices) to create better environmental, social and economic conditions.

It is important to mention the involvement of the local academic community, who have been collecting and interpreting qualitative and quantitative information about these wetlands since 2021. Ecological restoration interventions are currently being carried out in the Zhogra, San Martin, Guiquiña and Busa lagoons in the Jubones basin, and Quingor, Chobshi and Narig in the Paute basin, with the intention of replicating this good practice in the different degraded bodies of water.

• https://www.azuay.gob.ec/index.php/2023/02/13/humedales-del-azuay-recuperan-su-esplendor/  (External link)
• More information (In Spanish) (External link)