Mexico's President, Enrique Peña Nieto, signed a series of decrees establishing water reserves in nearly 300 river basins across the country. The decrees are intended to help guarantee water supplies for the next 50 years for 45 million people.

Along with other existing water reserves, the new decrees are aimed at protecting the volume of water in almost half of Mexico’s 756 river basins, representing 55 percent of the country’s surface water.

A “water reserve” is a volume of water in a river basin allocated exclusively to protect nature and for human consumption. This involves leaving a certain amount of water in the rivers to run freely.

Over the past 12 years, a team coordinated by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the National Water Commission in Mexico, supported by the Gonzalo Rio Arronte Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, mapped the country’s rivers and identified the amount of water required to sustain the flora and fauna of each basin and meet the demands of growing human populations over the next 50 years.

President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the newly signed decrees. Credit: www.gob.mxThe water reserves include the Usumacinta, one of the largest and most biodiverse rivers in Central America, with a water reserve now protecting 93 percent of its water.

The decrees protect the basins of the rivers Grijalva-Usumacinta (Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche); Papaloapan (Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz); Pánuco (Mexico State, Queretaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Veracruz, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León); Costa Chica of Guerrero and Costa Grande (Guerrero and Oaxaca); San Fernando Soto la Marina (Tamaulipas and Nuevo León); Santiago (Aguascalientes, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Nayarit, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas); Actopan-Antigua (Veracruz and Puebla); Coast of Jalisco (Colima and Jalisco); and Ameca (Nayarit and Jalisco).

"Water reserves matter because they secure freshwater for nature and drinking water for people. From Cape Town, South Africa to California, communities are suffering when watersheds run dry," says Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF-US.

The Inter-American Development Bank has supported the program in recent years and is working with WWF to replicate it in Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.