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What-If

Explore what could change.

Choose a place, a documented issue and one of its documented interventions, then set how far it goes.

ILLUSTRATIVE SCENARIO — NOT A SCIENTIFIC PREDICTION. Built from documented causes, impacts and solutions plus general qualitative patterns. It contains no modelled numbers.

3 · Intervention
PilotScaledTransformative

Adopted across much of the area, with dedicated budgets and enforcement.

Illustrative scenario

What if Bogotá took a scaled approach to “Legal protection of páramos”?

Starting point · documented

WaterSeverity: Moderate
Páramo ecosystems and Bogotá's water supply

Most of Bogotá's drinking water originates in high-Andean páramo ecosystems that are sensitive to land use and climate change.

The intervention · documented

Legal protection of páramos

Colombian law restricts mining and certain agriculture within delimited páramos.

Limits the most damaging land uses.

Schematic direction of change

Supply and demand measures can act within years, while groundwater, rivers and wetlands often take much longer to recover.

Schematic, unitless illustration: relative pressure over time without the intervention compared with the intervention in place. Not based on measured data.NowLonger term →Relative pressure (unitless)
Without the intervention With the interventionSchematic shape only — no data, units or dates.

Causes this could address

  • Agricultural expansionPotato farming and cattle grazing encroach on páramo land.
  • Mining pressureMining interests have historically targeted páramo areas.

Impacts that could ease

  • Water supply riskDegraded páramos regulate water less effectively, especially in dry periods.
  • Biodiversity lossPáramos host many endemic plant species.

Wider reach at higher intensity is an assumption of this illustration.

How change might unfold

  1. Near term

    Operational gains such as reduced losses or new storage begin to show.

  2. Medium term

    Supply becomes more reliable in ordinary years if measures are sustained.

  3. Long term

    Aquifers and ecosystems recover slowly, if extraction and pollution stay below recharge and assimilation.

Faded stages are less likely to be reached at scaled intensity.

What this would not change

Rainfall variability and drought remain; interventions change how well the system copes, not the weather.

What it depends on

  • Sustained funding and institutional capacity
  • Consistent enforcement and monitoring
  • Local stakeholder support
  • Participation of affected communities

ILLUSTRATIVE SCENARIO — NOT A SCIENTIFIC PREDICTION. Built from documented causes, impacts and solutions plus general qualitative patterns. It contains no modelled numbers.

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