Let's talk about water, reservoirs and hydropower

Water, a vital resource for the population, agriculture, human and animal food, industry and energy generation, is the most consumed natural resource after oxygen. 

Without fresh water we would perish in a few days and our economic system would enter a crisis quickly, if not immediately. The new social crises and old migrations are mainly due to the lack of water resources. 

Only 3% of all the water on the planet is fresh and is not necessarily where people live, but requires large infrastructures for its transport, purification, distribution and subsequent collection, treatment and discharge at its destination, generally to the sea. 

However, the impact of population growth, agriculture and livestock, industries and energy generation and in the case of Panama, for the transit of ships through the canal of the same name, is increasingly putting pressure on the sources and proper use of this resource. 

It is planned to expand the physical limit of the Panama Canal basin to appropriate the water produced in the basin of the Indian River and other tributaries to build a reservoir of hundreds of hectares to transfer water to Gatun Lake and continue to support the maritime operations of the canal and a percentage, not yet estimated, for new water treatment plants that could supply the western region of the country. But this will require 900 million US dollars and permission to operate the company. The master plan must be very well developed and thoroughly explained to obtain both. 

On the other hand, and despite changes in weather patterns and the increase in average temperature (+1.2°C), we are still tied to hydroelectric generation as a renewable source of clean and economical energy. For me, they are neither the first nor the second. They are in fact the least sustainable and most expensive source of energy of all renewables. Their externalities are not included in the final cost, so they are charged to nature and the ancestral population as a phantom cost that future generations will have to pay. 

In other countries, fish migrations for spawning, highlighted by environmental groups, have forced governments to demolish these structures to conserve the area's natural biota. In others, the sustainability standard of the dams has been increased so that they conserve the resource even more, through their recycling and adaptation of the water mirror to other sources of generation such as solar and wind. They have also opened some areas of the reservoirs for ecotourism and agricultural and urban development. 

In the case of Latin America and Panama specifically, we continue to dam rivers, lose thousands of hectares of forests, kill hundreds of animal species and displace animal and human communities to capture the energy of water, with the discourse that it is a renewable energy. 

It is time to put an end to this nonsense and establish a timetable to make current hydroelectric energy more sustainable, prohibit the future construction of reservoirs for hydroelectric generation, reconversion of some of these into recreational centers, water reservoirs for human and animal consumption and agriculture. Development of the surrounding areas for ecotourism activities and finally declare hydroelectric energy non-renewable and promote its conversion in our energy matrix to a higher percentage of solar and wind power plants, which have a lower production cost and lower externalities than hydropower. 

In this way we will be advancing in the renewal of our energy matrix, the conservation of water for direct and indirect human consumption, the expansion of new tourist areas and the inclusion of locals, investment in hotels and activities that generate employment, but also ecological conservation, looking towards a country that has how to make green its gold.