Criteria to prioritize intervention areas in watersheds: the experience of the Program Focuencas II (Innovation, learning and communication for adaptive co-management of watersheds)

Planning processes in watersheds imply complex decisions with limited resources, consequently, to know where in a watershed our money, time and effort will produce the bigger impacts is the main reason to prioritize goals and intervention areas into a watershed. With this logic, the Program Focuencas II started to work with some common factors and their implications to select specific criteria to prioritize areas in its “laboratory sub watersheds”. Among these factors we have: (i) potable water to human consumption, (ii) floods, (iii) landslides and (iv) sedimentation in water bodies, to start defining the possible territory to prioritize as guides to work in every “sub watersheds” (two in Honduras: La Soledad micro-watershed and Copan river sub-watershed, and two in Nicaragua: sub-watersheds of Aguas Calientes and Jucuapa).