Relevant meetings of civil organizations and regional communities were held past June and July in San Miguel de Allende for the integration of the first Autonomous Water Audits (Contralotrías) in northern Guanajuato. These are citizen initiatives organized in various parts of the country to face and find solutions to the serious situation of water, threatened by scarcity, pollution, commercialization and an unequal distribution that affects human populations. These citizen bodies seek to influence public policies on water, for its rational use as a human right.
The meetings, sponsored by the Va por San Miguel de Allendecivil association, were conducted by Dr. Elena Burns, a renowned expert on water issues in Mexico, and her collaborators, who developed a workshop with all participants to the meeting, based on the main water problems in our region and the necessary action of society to face them.
The result was the formation of an Autonomous Water Audit, to which El Charco del Ingenio has joined, in accordance with its mission of defending our biocultural heritage, whose substantial component is water. It is worth remembering that the Botanical Garden has held three Water Forums in recent years, in which the water problems of the Upper Laja River Basin were raised, becoming nowadays more critical and threatening for our society.
We will be informing about the various actions of the Autonomous Water Audit in San Miguel de Allende and northern Guanajuato, open to the participation of citizens, residents, organizations and communities of our region.