Posted by Janice Woo
Oct. 31st, 2010
Hey guys,
Oct. 31st, 2010
Hey guys,
Here are some excerpts from the resources I’ve found.
BOGOTA WATER FUND
Borrowing strategies from the realm of high finance, the Conservancy has created a conservation trust fund to protect rivers and watersheds in Colombia — and help provide clean drinking water to Bogotá, the country's capital.
The fund will attract voluntary contributions from Bogotá's water treatment facilities to subsidize conservation projects — from strengthening protected areas to creating incentives for ecologically sustainable cattle ranching — that will keep sedimentation and runoff out of the region's rivers.
Without such projects, the facilities have to spend millions to remove those pollutants in order to provide clean drinking water for Bogotá's 8 million residents.
The fund — based on a pilot program in Ecuador — is projected to raise $60 million for conservation projects over the next 10 years. And the Conservancy plans to implement six more such funds in South American countries in the next two years.
“The best part of this initiative is that it is voluntary and will not raise water costs for residents,” explains Samuel Moreno Rojas, mayor of Bogotá. “It will help the city save on treatment costs.”
The Conservancy led the development of the first such water fund in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000. From a modest $10,000 start-up investment, that fund has already reached $6 million in capital and will disperse $900,000 this year for conservation in watersheds that supply drinking water for Quito’s 2 million residents.
Conservancy donors in the United States provided the seed money that enabled in-country staff to launch both of these funds.
“The Nature Conservancy in Maine believed in us, and that ultimately made this project possible,” says Aurelio Ramos, director of the Conservancy's NTA program and architect of the Bogotá Water Fund.
In 2007, donors in Maine contributed $50,000 in seed money to the NTA Program, enabling Ramos to put a grand vision into action.
http://www.nature.org/wherewework/southamerica/colombia/work/art24802.html
WATER IN BOGOTA
In Colombia, nearly 91% of the domestic and commercial wastewater is discharged directly, without previous treatment, into the receiving watercourses (Camacho et al., 2006). For these reasons, integrated urban drainage modelling is needed to understand the effects of pressures exerted within a catchment, to establish reference conditions, to design monitoring programmes, to perform operational planning as an instrument for cost-effective implementation of measures, and to assess impacts to produce management plans (Solvi, 2006).
www.hydrology.org.uk/Publications/exeter/59.pdf
SLUM SHELTER IN BOGOTA
As in most cities around the world that host slums areas, the slums of Bogotá are largely the result of rapid population increase without the housing and services provision that such growth demands. During the past few decades, Bogotá has seen sustained, rapid demographic growth through waves of rural-to-urban migration in the wake of general impoverishment and violence. The Bogotá urban perimeter expanded rapidly through illegal subdivisions, occupation and the development of marginal areas by immigrants. Bogotá’s inner-city slums, on the other hand, are mostly the result of urban transformation processes, whereby certain downtown areas underwent progressive social and physical deterioration and, increasingly, accommodated lower hierarchy social strata and economic activities.
The slums of Bogotá can be classified as the outcome of:
· Unplanned and informal urbanization through subdivisions in peripheral and marginal areas, largely characterized by an initial lack of physical and social infrastructure, but which are often – within a few years – improved by the city administration or through self-help (or combinations thereof);
· Squatter settlements with generally more dire physical and social circumstances (although this category historically has had a relatively low importance);
· Inner-city urban deterioration zones that came about through the progressive move of 19th-century industrial, military and other functions adjacent to the traditional urban centre to more appropriate locations, and the social, economic and physical deterioration that followed in the wake of this urban abandonment.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/cities/bogota.htm
EFFECT OF WATER ON HOUSING IN BOGOTA
In the rapidly expanding city many new housing developments lie close to farmlands. An- other example of groundwater-engineering geology problems is a development in NW Bogotá. It has an area of 211,400 mP, with three-story homes, built in 1994. During the past eight years the constructors have been monitoring the subsidence of part of this development which lies close to another flower plantation, […]
The houses were built on gently sloping ground of the Sabana Fm 20 to 105 m thick (clay, silt, peat, sand and gravel); beneath and outcropping to the west is the Guaduas Fm, 450 m thick (claystones, sandstones, coal beds) […]
Four factors acting simultaneously cause differential settlements beneath the houses: very compressible beds with a high pore ratio; fluctuation of the water table responding to the rainfall cycles and causing contractions, fissuration and subsidence of the surface soils; the drop of the potentiometric level of the aquifers with the increase of the effective stress, accelerating the consolidation; and abundance of organic clays and peat in the western part of the lot. Micropiles have been constructed up to the thick gravels beneath the houses to solve the problem.
www.rmz-mg.com/letniki/rmz50/rmz50_0193-0196.pdf
