Observatory for Social Appropiation Knowledge on Bogotá River Basin, Colombia

3. Environmental Engineering Program. Agraria University of Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract: Bogotá river basin is conformed of 46 municipalities, including Bogota city, is the ordering axis of Cundinamarca department and is considered one of the most important river basin in Colombia; for decades, it has presented pollution problems throughout its entire path. In March 2014, the State Council issued the sentence “Environmental and Social Improvement of the Bogotá River Basin” in response to numerous popular actions filed, aimed at the recovery and conservation of the river and its tributaries; therefore, the implementation of actions for the integral management of the water resource is necessary, in order to ensure its viability towards the future. To promote the effectiveness of management, the initiative to create the environmental information platform Environmental observatory of the Bogotá river basin “OCRB” emerged from the Master Program in Wathershed Management of the Santo Tomas University; in order to ensure effective disclosure from research, projects or contracts between different social, governmental and academic actors. For the development of the research, two databases were built, one with the information of the main actors and another with information of academic documents (undergraduate and postgraduate thesis) and scientific documents that have been generated in the basin during last years. 253 documents were collected that were classified into five research lines; water resource management, climate variability and climate change, territorial planning, risk management and social participation. The databases were the main input to start the process of creating the observatory, which was launched in November of 2019 under the domain of the Santo Tomas University (Colombia). It is expected that, with the creation and continuous updating of the observatory, the different actors will have up-to-date and reliable information that will allow them to develop their management activities, to contribute to the social appropriation of knowledge and promote water governance in the territory.