The Dr. Veronica Delgado Schneideracademic of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of the University de Concepción, UdeC, participates as Principal Investigator and Alternate Director of the Millennium Nucleus Project in Andean Peatlands, awarded a few weeks ago and financed by the National Agency for Research and Development.
The researcher was invited to participate in this project by virtue of her extensive experience in the field of legislation on environmental issues and water resourceshighlighting in this sense the protection of wetlands, in general, but, in this specific case, they will work in peat bogs or bogs in the north of our country.
“We congratulate Dr. Delgado for the achievement of awarding a project of this magnitude, which is the result of her great career bringing legal sciences closer to environmental issues. This shows that interdisciplinary work makes it possible to address complex and impactful issues”, highlights the Dr. Andrea Rodríguez TastetsVice Chancellor for Research and Development at the UdeC.
“This project”, explains Dr. Delgado, “seeks to understand how these ecosystems work and how they behave in the face of climate change, how they contribute by containing water, considering that they are used by many communities as sources of work and culturally vibrant landscapes; which involves ancestral knowledge, many of which are threatened by the extractive industrial activity of the north”.
For this reason, it also stands out Director of the Law, Environment and Climate Change Program“it seems interesting that public policies recognize their particular characteristics and the project uses, for example, state-of-the-art telemetry technology to identify them, to see how much they will grow in the year, how water extraction affects, or one year that is drier than another , etc.”.
The research group, explains the academic of the Department of Economic Law of the UdeChas worked with the surrounding indigenous communities in these sites, since he affirms, “the idea is to link state-of-the-art science with this ancestral knowledge, in such a way that public policies and laws recognize these realities, these ecosystems surrounded by people and productive activities, understood as a hydrosocial system, and this has to be recognized by any governance, any public policy or any law that wants to protect them, which is essential in the context of water scarcity that we have and increasingly accelerated climate change ”.
The expert points out that our country already has legal bodies for specific protection for similar sites such as urban wetlands and pompons in the south of our country, and now the challenge is to be able to protect the peat bogs in the northern Andes. “We hope that this project manages to influence to the point of having a special policy of the Ministry of the Environment or a law, especially considering that they are not only in Chile, but also in Bolivia, Argentina and Peru; In other words, this research can have significant repercussions in other countries as well, and that motivates us even more because nature has no borders and there shouldn’t be any in knowledge either”.
Interdiscipline and diversity as a motor
Professor Delgado has experience in these complex issues that, as such, must be approached from different perspectives. “Linking the Social Sciences with the Biological Sciences, in what is called frontier knowledge, makes us leave the comfort zone of the discipline itself, interact with others and generate knowledge among all. Personally, it motivates me because I learn a lot and I hope my colleagues do too”.
In particular in this research, she is the only academic from the southern part of the country, but she defines it as a “project of regions, led by a university from the north, which is something that does not usually happen and, furthermore, there are several women who integrate itand as if that were not enough, one of its objectives is the training of researchers with strong regional roots”.
The project is directed by Dr. Manuel Prieto, tenured professor at the U. of Tarapacá and, in addition, has the participation of researchers from the Pontificia U. Católica de Valparaíso and the U. Diego Portales, in Chile and “ obviously, senior researchers from prestigious national and international research centers”.
