Rodrigo Fuster

• Dr.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Chile

Owing to the Mediterranean-like and highly variable climate of western South America, moderate droughts (20–30 % precipitation deficit) recur every 3–5 years in central Chile, alternating with wet years. Since 2010, however, this region has experienced a continuous dry spell, including extremely dry conditions in 2019 and 2021, when annual precipit...

In many countries, the drinking water provision in rural areas is in the charge of the users themselves, who constitute rural water supply services (RWS) to operate and maintain the public infrastructure provided by the State. However, in practice, the condition of the components of the implied infrastructure managed by RWS varies considerably, whi...

The governance model established in Chilean water law delegates responsibility for groundwater management to private water rights owners. The Copiapó aquifer in the Atacama Region, Chile, has problems of overexploitation resulting from intensive use of the resource. This is explained by the limited information on the water availability in the aquif...

Frente al problema de escasez hídrica forzada por el cambio climático en Chile, particularmente en la zona norte del país, se han instalado plantas desalinizadoras de distintos tamaños, con varias más en proceso de estudio y evaluación. La masificación de esta tecnología nos plantea el desafío de planificar su desarrollo futuro tomando decisiones...

Chile has defined an energy development policy in which hydropower is an important part of the energy grid. This energy source has not yet been accepted by many people in local communities. For future hydroelectric development to be more widely accepted, the Chilean Ministry of Energy developed a methodological framework called Objects of Valuation...

In 1981, Chile created the legal figure of consumptive and non-consumptive Water-Use Rights (WURs), which gave way to the process of water commoditization and the consequent "water market". Since that date, multiple investigations have studied the evolution and characteristics of the consumptive WURs market but focused on consumptive WURs in northe...

Both supporters and critics of the Chilean water model have described it as a textbook example of deregulation and the free-market model for water management. In this article, we challenge this characterization and argue that the model has relied on long-term and highly centralized State decisions that have installed and reproduced historical power...

This article presents a dataset on the accumulated water flow (L/s) granted in the Antofagasta Region for each year between 1905 and 2018. We produced the dataset starting from the official public records on water rights (Registro Público de Derechos de Aprovechamiento de Aguas, RPDAA), which are free to access and available at the National Water A...

Snow cover area is dramatically decreasing across the Los Andes Mountains and the most relevant water reservoir under drought conditions. In this sense, monitoring of snow cover is key to analyzing the hydrologic balance in snowmelt-driven basins. MODIS Snow Cover daily products (MOD10A1 and MYD10A1) allow snow cover to be monitored at regular time...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is key to assess crop water balance and optimize water-use efficiency. To attain sustainability in cropping systems, especially in semi-arid ecosystems, it is necessary to improve methodologies of ET estimation. A method to predict ET is by using land surface temperature (LST) from remote sensing data and applying the Operat...

Energy and water have faced important levels of conflicts in the last 20–25 years in Chile. However, the way that they have been politically addressed in the last decade differs. These differences emerge from how these fields have been historically configurated, impacting on how the policy problems and policy options have been framed. Using themati...

Chile is positioned in the 20th rank of water availability per capita. Nonetheless, water security levels vary across the territory. Around 70% of the national population lives in arid and semiarid regions, where a persistent drought has been experienced over the last decade. This has led to water security problems including water shortages. The wa...

Seasonal snow and glaciers in arid mountain regions are essential in sustaining human populations, economic activity, and ecosystems, especially in their role as reservoirs. However, they are threatened by global atmospheric changes, in particular by variations in air temperature and their effects on precipitation phase, snow dynamics and mass bala...

Climate change together with changes in land cover and water allocations are expected to affect water resources availability. The long-term effect of these changes on available water resources in central Chile was comprehensively evaluated through climatic trends from 1982, land cover changes from 2001, and water allocations from 1980. Trends in cl...

Water is one of the most demanded resources in rural areas of developing countries. Its management and governance need knowledge transfers and interactions among several actors at different administrative levels, starting with local social actors’ participation. In this article, we analyze the water governance in Chile using (i) a governance instru...

One of the most important components of the earth's surface water balance is evapotranspiration, which regulates the exchange of energy between ground and atmosphere. The effects of global warming intensify the water demand and therefore, the potential scarcity of water could affect several landscapes and agricultural systems. Therefore, it is esse...

The evidence for global warming can be seen in various forms, such as glacier shrinkage, sea ice retreat, sea level rise and air temperature increases. The magnitude of these changes tends to be critical over pristine and extreme biomes. Chilean Patagonia is one of the most pristine and uninhabited regions in the world, home to some of the most imp...

In 1960, only 6% of the rural population had an adequate water supply system. At present rural water coverage has increased to 53%; however, considering only concentrated and semi-concentrated rural towns, 88% the rural population has access to water supply systems. This increase is the result of Chile’s national Rural Potable Water (APR) program,...

Disponible: http://repositorio.uchile.cl/handle/2250/147838

En la zona montañosa de la cuenca del río Copiapó gran parte de la precipitación es sólida, no obstante, la nieve en invierno no necesariamente se traduce en mayores escurrimientos en la temporada de ablación, lo que trae consigo incertidumbre en la disponibilidad para los usuarios del agua. El presente trabajo, modeló la precipitación sólida que s...

Monitoring evapotranspiration in arid and semi-arid environments plays a key role in water irrigation scheduling for water use efficiency. This work presents an operational method for evapotranspiration retrievals based on disaggregated Land Surface Temperature (LST). The retrieved LSTs from Landsat-8 and MODIS data were merged in order to provide...

Se analiza la gestión de cuencas desde la perspectiva de la seguridad hídrica, para la región latinoamericana con énfasis en Chile. El libro puede descargarse en http://fch.cl/recurso/sustentabilidad/desafios-del-agua-la-region-latinoamericana/

A set of Essential Climate Variables (ECV) have been defined to be monitored by current and new remote sensing missions. The ECV retrieved at global scale need to be validated in order to provide reliable products to be used in remote sensing applications. For this, test sites are required to use in calibration and validation of the remote sensing...

Evaluation of evapotranspiration (ET) estimates over large areas is necessary before they can be used. This work presents the preliminary results of the “Hydric demand model for improving basin water management” project carried out in the Copiapó Basin, which is located in the southern boundary of the Atacama Desert, Chile. As a first approach to e...

Soil moisture has been defined as one of the essential climate variables by several worldwide climate and earth observation expert panels. During the last decades several explorer mission have been launched in order to obtain reliable results of soil moisture at global scale. The most recent and successfully lunched project is the Soil Moisture and...

To assess the current status of surface waters, it is necessary, as a first step, to have a system that includes a set of criteria for classifying and describing each existing surface water body. In this article, a new river typology system for Chile based on the Water Framework Directive of the European Union is shown. This system was created foll...

This paper examines whether the fees for non-use of water rights implemented in Chile in 2005 have provided an incentive for the exploitation of unused water. Two comparisons are made and descriptively analysed: between fees charged and paid, and between fees and the market price of water rights. In the successive fee charging rounds, payment level...

Background/Question/Methods Quantification of ecosystem water-use efficiency (WUEe) in natural and managed ecosystems is important to address uncertainties related to the effects of global warming and land use change. This is especially important in arid ecosystems, where the impacts of these processes are expected to be high. We continuously mea...

El acceso al agua es, hoy en día, un asunto de creciente interés para los gobiernos del mundo, y en general para toda la población. Y es que el agua se está transformando en un recurso cada vez más escaso, y como tal, la necesidad de acceder a él se hace cada vez más imperiosa. Basta con saber que, en el mundo, 1.100 millones de personas viven sin...

Resumen Se aplicó un índice que permite orientar a los tomadores de decisiones en la búsqueda de una gestión más eficiente del recurso hídrico. Para ello, se estudió un índice denominado Índice de Pobreza Hídrica, WPI (por su sigla en inglés) desarrollado por el Centre for Ecology & Hidrology de Londres, el cual combina una serie de indicadores sec...