The Money Exists. The Frameworks Don’t. Why Water Infrastructure Funding Struggles to Reach Watersheds.
Every year, governments and institutions commit billions to water infrastructure, and almost none of it reaches the ecosystems that make that infrastructure work. Mountains are the source of up to 60% of the world’s freshwater flows. High-altitude forests, wetlands, and peatlands regulate those flows, sustaining more than two billion people. In the Andes, it is Indigenous and local communities who have stewarded these landscapes for generations, doing the work that water infrastructure budgets were designed to pay for. Yet the frameworks behind that funding were never built to include them.
The problem is structural. Enormous budgets exist for water infrastructure in public and private systems, but those frameworks were built for concrete and steel, not for community-led restoration in remote mountain landscapes. Legally and financially, the system was never designed to recognize, value, and invest in what nature provides. Closing that gap is the work Global Forest Generation was built to do.
A New Model from the Andes
In Peru’s Chincha Valley, Acción Andina is working with the Villa de Arma highland community to restore native forests, wetlands, and peatlands that regulate water for approximately 250,000 people downstream. What makes the project notable is not only the ecology, but the financing and governance model behind it.
Textil del Valle (TDV), a textile manufacturer whose operations depend on the same watershed, is a committed stakeholder rather than a traditional donor. Support from Patagonia and Lacoste helped bring the partnership to life, creating a new template for how communities, companies, and civil society can work together around a shared interest: long-term water security.
The project also combines reforestation with wetland and peatland recovery, a critical shift. Reforestation may take a decade or more to deliver measurable hydrological benefits, while wetland interventions can begin generating results within a year. Together, they create a faster-acting and more resilient model for watershed restoration.
Chincha also illustrates a broader challenge. Projects like this deliver many of the same outcomes that governments seek through water infrastructure investments: improved water security, resilience, and long-term system performance. Yet communities often struggle to access the funding streams designed to support those goals. This disconnect reflects the limitations of the financial and legal frameworks that govern infrastructure investment.
From Community-led Projects to Systems
The Chincha model is a blueprint that can be replicated across dozens of Pacific coast watersheds and hundreds more across the Andes. But scaling this work requires access to infrastructure investment beyond conservation funding. And that starts with how we define nature itself.
Nature is infrastructure, but it’s been treated as something to protect at the margins of development. For us, ecosystem renewal in the Andes is not a conservation project. It is a water infrastructure intervention. The forests, wetlands, grasslands, and headwaters that Acción Andina safeguards support cities, agriculture, industry, and entire economies. What happens upstream is infrastructure. It always has been.
Scaling Acción Andina’s work requires creating pathways between community-led restoration and the institutions that control infrastructure investment. Andean communities have long understood something modern finance is only beginning to grasp: that healthy systems require reciprocity. We must begin building financial systems that work with nature rather than around it, combining the irreplaceable ancestral wisdom that Indigenous and local communities carry with the tools, technology, and capital that modern institutions can mobilize at scale.
Building the Missing Frameworks
Governments and utilities are already paying the costs of degraded upstream ecosystems, through sedimentation, flooding, and failing water systems. That money exists. It just isn’t being connected to the restoration work that could prevent those costs in the first place. Redirecting even a fraction of it toward the ecosystems that support water security and resilience is possible. The only thing standing in the way is the frameworks, partnerships, and imagination to connect them.
Investing upstream in nature is not philanthropy. It is a long-term investment in water security, resilience, and shared prosperity.
This is the challenge Global Forest Generation and Arup, supported by The Earthshot Prize, are bringing to an event at London Climate Action Week. By convening on-the-ground practitioners, infrastructure planners, engineers, financiers, and community leaders, the goal is to build the bridges that allow community-led restoration to become a legitimate and investable component of water infrastructure planning, not as an alternative to modern systems, but as an essential part of them.
That work is already underway, and we are committed to advancing it from the Andes outward. London is the next step.
