GWP South America recently organised the first Latin American workshop on International Waters Law. The initiative is a collaboration with GWP Central America and aims to encourage improved international cooperation on water governance.

GWP participated in a meeting of the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS) in Lima 2-4 December 2013. The topic was urban water management, and the meeting enabled advances in the elaboration of the IANAS book “Urban water in the Americas”, to be launched later this year.

In response to the drought and water shortage in the north of Chile, in 2012 several proposals were put forward to carry water from the central-south zone to the northern zone. Two projects, one French and the other Spanish, propose carrying water through the sea and across the land respectively.

GWP South America is working on the implementation of a new Latin American Training Programme on Water Legislation for International River Basins. This programme aims to encourage improved international cooperation and facilitate good water governance in the region. Its main outputs will be three training workshops, a manual to support training processes and a monitoring report which will identify knowledge gaps, capacity needs, lessons learned and follow-up needs.

GWP Peru carried out the First Dialogue on National Development and Water Security in the context of Climate Change Adaptation on March 1, 2013, at the National Water Authority Auditorium in Lima. Its aim was to involve and sensitize actors across all sectors on the tight links among water management, adaptation to climate change, and sustainable economic growth.

Conflicts over water use in the Chancay-Lambayeque Basin in northern Peru have increased sharply. 

Chile's export-oriented economy based on products like copper, fruit, wood, salmon and wine – all of which need water for their production – has led to a significant increase in water use. 

The Second Water Sustainability Summit was held 27 September 2012 in Chile and gathered more than 900 people. It brought together national key players and international experts to discuss actions towards national water sustainability.

Following on the series of successful regional workshops on Water Financing carried out in 2009 and 2010 by GWP and the EUWI in South America, the international seminar, "Water and Environmental Sanitation Financing" was held in Porto Alegre on June 11, organized by GWP Brazil in partnership with ABES-RS, the Brazilian Association for Sanitation and Environmental Engineering. Its aim was to identify and promote ways of funding water resources management.

GWP Chile organized a seminar "Towards an Integrated Water Resources Management” in Santiago on Tuesday, December 13 together with the Faculty of Law at Gabriela Mistral University. The workshop emerged as an initiative from the Diagnosis of Water Resources Management developed by the World Bank and disseminated by the General Water Directorate in June 2011.