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Bofedales are Tropical high-Andean wetlands that can be found from Chile and northern Argentina to Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, with its main distribution in Bolivia and Peru. They provide important ecosystem services, like e.g. the regulation and (temporal) retention of water flows, carbon sequestration, and fodder production for mainly alpaca herding. There is a strong link and mutualism between these ecosystems and local, peasant communities. Nevertheless, relatively few of these interactions are documented in the scientifc literature. Therefore, it is important to review also dispersed information about the use and management of bofedales in technical reports of public and private institutions and other kind of grey literature. Recently, bofedales have gained more attention in the frame of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies and in the context of concepts like nature-based solutions and/or natural infrastructure for water security. The main objective of the current study is to systematize the evidence about the importance of bofedales in the actual climate change adaptation debate, and more concretely the specific practices applied in bofedales management by local communities. I will apply a systematic review of scientific and grey literature, using also a broad information search in google. The information obtained will be sistematized in order to give preliminary answers to the following, main research questions: a) What is the current status of community-managed bofedales in the frame of current climate change adaptation strategies? b) What concrete practices are applied to bofedales ecosystems in order to strengthen resilience towards the negative impacts of climate change? c) What is the potential of community-managed bofedales to fill important gaps in future climate change adaptation strategies? The results of this systematization will help policy-makers to better understand the crucial role that Andean (traditional) communities play in the sustainable management of bofedales ecosystems and how these contributions, in the near future, could be recognized through mechanisms of payment for ecosystem services, considering also the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) in the frame of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Keywords:
bofedales, Andean communities, water and bofedales management, climate change adaptation