The South Rupununi District Council (SRDC) hosted a four-day water monitoring workshop from March 26-29, co-facilitated by the Global Justice Clinic (GJC) of NYU School of Law and Dr. Beth Hoagland, in Aishalton Village, Guyana. Since 2013, the SRDC has been monitoring violations of their land rights—particularly environmental degradation and illegal mining. The workshop launched the SRDC’s water monitoring pilot as an extension of the Council’s existing monitoring program to include monitoring the adverse impacts of mining on Wapichan territory.

The workshop served as a knowledge exchange between participants with complementary expertise:

• Monitors from local indigenous communities shared extensive cultural and intergenerational knowledge of their environment. They also shared their goals for water monitoring, their insights from years of experience participating in the SRDC’s and the Upper Mazaruni District Council’s (UMDC) existing monitoring programs, and their first-hand knowledge of the destructive impacts of mining.
• Dr. Beth Hoagland, a water expert, shared lessons in hydrology­–the scientific study of water. This included the principles of water monitoring, water sources and the impacts of mining. In addition, Dr. Hoagland demonstrated the use of field-based water monitoring equipment and the process for collecting water samples for lab testing of dissolved metals, including mercury.
• Professor Meg Satterthwaite, together with Katie Wightman, GJC Fellow, and Julia Chen and Jennifer Pierre, GJC law student advocates, shared lessons on human rights, legal empowerment and advocacy. This encompassed the legal framework behind water monitoring, including international laws that protect the rights of indigenous peoples and human rights such as the rights to water and a healthy environment, as well as Guyanese laws that regulate mining.
• Participants discussed the legal justifications behind a custom-made questionnaire to capture water monitoring data, and how that data can be analysed and converted into meaningful reports by the SRDC and UMDC for legal empowerment and advocacy purposes.

Read the complete announcement here.