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# Copy of Water credits from agroforestry systems
*This is a* [*bricolage*](/foundations/bricolage.md) *protocol; which means we are building it in public! Some pages are under construction — but check back soon its updating fast!*
The communities we work with consistently identify water access and quality as among their most immediate and non-negotiable concerns. There is an urgent need to democratize scientific, legal, governance, and inclusion in environmental decision-making, particularly around pollution control and water governance [(Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2020)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=12476267\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0). However, effective water interventions typically require sustained access to legal frameworks, hydrological science, monitoring infrastructure, and regulatory enforcement—resources from which these communities have been systematically excluded [(World Bank 2006)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=16133002\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).
Land use and water outcomes have well-established links [(Bruijnzeel 2004; Ellison et al. 2017)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18749401,18749441\&pre=\&pre=\&suf=\&suf=\&sa=0,0). Loss of forest cover and soil organic matter increases erosion and sedimentation, reduces water retention, and elevates pollutant loads in rivers and aquifers. Conversely, AFS, riparian buffers, and soil amendments such as biochar improve infiltration, reduce nutrient and chemical runoff, enhance water-holding capacity, and immobilize heavy metals and organic pollutants [(de Koning et al. 2011; Beesley et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2013; Gwenzi et al. 2017)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=7427273,18627092,4550563,9176331\&pre=\&pre=\&pre=\&pre=\&suf=\&suf=\&suf=\&suf=\&sa=0,0,0,0). These interventions are particularly relevant in tropical regions where degraded soils and high rainfall amplify water quality risks.
Unlike carbon, water services are inherently local, basin-specific, and difficult to aggregate into standardized, fungible units. Global water credit markets remain largely theoretical, fragmented, and regulatory rather than market-driven. Where water payments have worked — surcharges on Colombian water bills financing upstream conservation, Costa Rican companies paying farmers to restore headwaters for beer, juice, and hydroelectric production — they have succeeded precisely because they are local, bilateral, and tied to tangible use rather than abstracted into tradable units [(Pagiola et al. 2005)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18749359\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).
A key economic insight for this dimension came from successful institutional projects in the New York City watershed involving upriver farmers. Designers concluded that small, action-based payments to upstream land stewards were an effective way to get financial resources to communities to combat water problems. However, this project relied on institutional cost-avoidance logic rather than tradable credits [(Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), U.S. Department of Agriculture)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18625648\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).
The Ecuadorian Socio Bosque program has shown hydrological effects through a per-hectare conservation payment. After two years, the national government program enrolled 500,000 hectares with over 60,000 beneficiaries. While this is not a free-market mechanism, it remains of high interest to our team in terms of its grassroots economics, adoption, community satisfaction, and poverty alleviation [(de Koning et al. 2011)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18627092\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).
We have seen successful water protection from Rights of Nature legal cases involving women in Peru [(Kauffman et al. 2025)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18625620\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0). The communities were more successful when they organized on behalf of the waterway itself. However, we believe it's inherently unrealistic to quantify absolute hydrological outcomes in most grassroots projects, requiring dense, long-term monitoring and sophisticated science.
Instead, we are investigating and co-designing a grassroots action-based water credit protocol that rewards tangible practices with well-established links to water resilience. These include (1) conservation of intact waterways and riparian zones, (2) restoration of degraded watercourses,(3) application of low-technology biochar to improve soil structure, reduce contaminant mobility, and increase water retention, (4) stabilization of artisanal mine sites to eliminate heavy metal contamination at source (candidate protocol, under development), (5) use of mangroves to filter nitrogen runoff.
We are developing an experimental unit — 1 water credit = 100 gallons of usable water per month — where "usable" collapses the quality/volume distinction: water that exists but is too contaminated to use, and clean water not retained in the watershed, are both non-usable by the same definition. This unit remains unvalidated in the field and functions as a proposed standard rather than a market instrument, but it provides a tractable anchor for protocol development and buyer communication. Its primary value lies in democratizing access to environmental finance, supporting local stewardship, and reducing near-term pressures that drive water degradation.
Future development will require scientific validation of attribution, improved hydrological indicators, and integration of contaminant-specific metrics (including mercury) before broader market standardization can be responsibly pursued.
So we have analyzed all the crediting options we think are available to an agroforestry system. And we believe they make sense, could reach a market, and are tantalizingly close to being realizable. But it's clear from our analysis that although we can advance science from these actions, we are not in a position to credit the best actions available to us reliably.
The layers are sound. The theory holds. The protocols are emerging, and pragmatic implementation can probably yield the financial system we theorized. But when, and can smallfarmers afford to implement these systems now?
Humanity is a clever species, and we can figure this out. We will find out how to measure, quantify, and weigh the above dimensions. But if we wait until we do implement AFS to guarantee food security, we will truly be out of time.
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