César Pérez Hurtado

Groundwater provides global water security, supplying over half of the world’s drinking water. In Bolivia, it is particularly important for mitigating drought impacts and sustaining municipal supply. Yet national planning still lacks a clear picture of how groundwater recharge is changing. This study maps potential groundwater recharge change for all 338 municipalities from 1983 to 2022 and presents a policy-oriented risk indicator. Monthly precipitation (P), evapotranspiration (ET), and runoff (R) were obtained from TerraClimate (≈4 km) and FLDAS (≈10 km). A water-balance model converted these variables to potential groundwater recharge. Mann–Kendall and Theil–Sen statistics quantified long-term trends, and Pettitt’s test located years of abrupt change. The Annual Reduction of Potential Groundwater Recharge (RAPReHS) was derived to classify each municipality into one of five risk levels based on long-term groundwater recharge trends. Negative trends are significant in 65% of municipalities, and 71% record at least one breakpoint, most often between 2012 and 2015. Santa Cruz shows the steepest mean decline (–1.9 mm yr⁻¹), yet similar losses occur along the Chapare–Yungas corridor of La Paz and Cochabamba, the southern lowlands of Beni, and the Chaco of Tarija. By contrast, Pando and parts of northern Beni retain near-neutral or slightly positive slopes, highlighting strong hydro-climatic heterogeneity. Spatial comparison between RAPReHS results and, deforestation and fire statistics reveals strong alignment. Municipalities in the ‘high’ and ‘severe’ classes spatially overlap with the main zones of primary forest loss recorded in Bolivia between 2000 and 2022. The RAPReHS framework, therefore, provides a reproducible, policy-ready lens through which to track groundwater as land-use pressures and climate variability intensify.

Landscapes settled by indigenous communities represent nuanced inter-relationships between culture and environment, where balance is achieved through Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). Through IKS, native peoples worldwide live, farm, and consume resources in a manner that is responsive to natural systems and, as such, their lands present less deforestation and more sustainable production per capita than is exhibited by non-indigenous practices. In Bolivia, the Origin Farmer Indigenous Territory (TIOC) communities of Yaminahua-Machineri and Takana-Cavineño, located in the North Amazon, are facing external threats of non-indigenous anthropogenic land use change, such as road-building and industrial-scale resource extraction. In order to understand the potential environmental and cultural loss to these territories, the present work seeks to determine the present, base-line conservation state within these Bolivian communities, and forecast land use change and its consequences until the year 2030. This was undertaken using a three-stage protocol: (a) the TIOC communities’ current forest-based livelihoods, characteristics and management were determined using on-site observation techniques and extensive literature review; (b) the historical land use change (LUC) from natural vegetation to anthropogenic use was estimated using multitemporal satellite imagery; and, finally, (c) geographically explicit non-indigenous anthropogenic land-use change threat was extrapolated until 2030 using the GEOMOD modeler from the TerraSet software. Preliminary results show that both TIOCs case-sites are fairly conserved due to their forest dependence. However, deforestation and degradation could be evidenced, particularly within TIOC areas not officially recognized by the central government, due to pressures from surrounding, new non-indigenous settlements, road infrastructure, connection to markets, and the threat of the oil exploitation. Projected LUC suggest serious threats to the unrecognized TIOC areas if community governance is not reinforced, and if extractivist and non-indigenous development patterns continue to be promoted by state and central government.