Titicaca Aqua Watch: Indigenous Empowerment for Environmental Justice

Community impact: Beyond generating water quality data, the project contributed to strengthening environmental awareness and justice-oriented dialogue within Indigenous communities in Chojasivi. Indigenous senior high school students participated directly in citizen science monitoring, creating space for reflection on pollution, ecosystem degradation, and the loss of environmental services. A key community impact emerged through intergenerational exchange. Many participating students had grown up under conditions of severe pollution and persistent hypereutrophication and therefore perceived the degraded river environment as normal. Interviews and reflective discussions revealed a shift in perspective: several students initiated conversations with older generations to learn about historical river conditions and the benefits the community previously derived from the river. This process helped revive ecological memory and supported a deeper understanding of environmental change as a long-term and socially unequal process. Overall, the project strengthened locally grounded knowledge, reinforced community capacity to interpret water quality challenges, and supported the empowerment of youth and community members to engage in environmental justice and water rights discussions.

Community impact types: Awareness-raising

Achievements:
Established a community-based citizen science monitoring initiative in Lake Titicaca in collaboration with four Indigenous communities in Chojasivi and the Bolivian Catholic University. Generated locally grounded water quality data across multiple monitoring sites and campaigns, covering key physicochemical parameters (pH, PO₄, NO₃, EC, turbidity, TDS, temperature). Strengthened community capacity in water quality monitoring through hands-on training in sampling, data collection, and basic interpretation. Integrated Indigenous knowledge into the assessment through focus group discussions, enabling the documentation of local environmental observations and community interpretations of water quality change. Supported evidence generation on environmental injustices by linking monitoring results with community-identified pollution pressures, lived experience, and local narratives. Fostered mutual learning and sustained collaboration between Indigenous communities, university researchers, and students. Contributed to community empowerment by strengthening the evidence base available for environmental justice advocacy and water justice claims.

Challenges:
A key challenge was ensuring the accurate registration of GPS coordinates for the sampling points. During the first monitoring campaigns, several errors were identified in the recorded coordinates, which affected the reliability of site identification. To address this, a quality control process was implemented to verify coordinate consistency, and datasets with unreliable location information were discarded. In subsequent campaigns, additional guidance and supervision were provided during fieldwork to strengthen accuracy in coordinate recording.

Outreach methods:
The project uses multiple communication formats to support participant recruitment, engagement, and knowledge sharing. Audiovisual materials play a central role, including short videos and photo-based documentation used to explain the project objectives, introduce monitoring activities, and support learning during field campaigns. These materials also help communicate findings in an accessible way for community members, students, and local stakeholders. In addition, the project relies on in-person meetings, community workshops, and participatory discussions to maintain engagement and support collective interpretation of results.

Interesting highlights:
What is special about this project is that it went beyond water quality monitoring and created a meaningful intergenerational dialogue on environmental justice, ecological change, and the loss of ecosystem services. Many of the participating Indigenous senior high school students have grown up under conditions of severe pollution and persistent hypereutrophication, meaning they have no alternative reference point for what the river ecosystem used to be. As a result, living near a heavily polluted river had become normalized. Through interviews and reflective discussions, the project revealed an important shift: several students began engaging older generations to ask about past river conditions and the benefits the community previously received from the river. This intergenerational exchange helped revive ecological memory and supported a deeper understanding of the environmental problem as historically produced and socially unequal.

Surface water

Water Governance Environmental Justice

Water Indigenous culture Social sciences

Medium

Data analysis Learning Measurement Transcription

Neighbourhood

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