ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Institute for Water Resources (IWR) released a report titled, Shared Vision Planning for Sustainable Water Resources Management, Guayubín River Subbasin, Northwestern Dominican Republic (Phase 1), which describes the first phase of a project in which the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is developing a Decision-Support Tool (DST) for the sustainable management of water resources in that subbasin.
The USACE project team, composed of personnel from the Institute for Water Resources (IWR), the USACE Sacramento District, the USACE Jacksonville District’s (SAJ) Interagency Modeling Center, and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), is coordinating with the Dominican Republic’s Presidential Commission for the Land Use Planning and Management of the Yaque del Norte River Basin (CRYN).
CRYN’s membership includes national government ministries and agencies; local, regional, and sectoral representatives; cooperatives and civil society organization. Its mission is to build a governance model for the conservation and sustainable use of water resources within the Yaque del Norte River basin. The project is using the Shared Vision Planning (SVP) approach to develop the DST.
SVP is a collaborative approach to formulating water management solutions, developed by IWR’s Collaboration and Public Participation Center of Expertise (CPCX). It integrates (1) traditional water resources planning, (2) structured public participation, and (3) decision-support modeling, with the main goal being to support a more collaborative planning process, including all impacted stakeholders (e.g., local communities, irrigators, hydropower generators, environmental groups, and others).
The report covers Phase 1 of the project and is primarily a field report of the first year of activities, meetings, model development, and other actions conducted in the subbasin during 2019-2020 by USACE and colleagues in the Dominican Republic. This is significant because it explains how those activities contribute to collaborative water resources planning and decision making in the region and will be useful for future endeavors. However, it does not offer policy recommendations or advice to the Dominican Republic government or to stakeholder groups in the basin.
Due to COVID-19, field work planned to be carried out during the months of March-September 2020 was postponed and design and planning activities were adapted to a virtual environment, which delayed implementation of the SVP workshops.
In place of these, the USACE team focused on the development of a preliminary hydrologic and hydraulics (H&H) model, a system model that incorporates H&H output and other data and transforms them into management metrics, and a user-friendly interface (the DST) for comparing options and making decisions. Dominican water professionals were trained (virtually) in how to both use and further develop these models and tools.
The report also covers the products and the primary outcomes of these FY20 efforts to support CRYN in its development of a governance model for the Guayubín River subbasin.
The report is available for free download from the IWR Library.
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