Yarinacocha is located in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. The city of around 100,000 inhabitants is close to the regional capital Pucallpa. 26% of Yarinacocha’s population live in poverty, 3.6% in extreme poverty. A large proportion of the urban population has no access to clean drinking water. All the district’s wastewater is discharged into the Ucayali River and the Yarinacocha Lagoon untreated. This has a negative impact on the environment, health, tourism, and economic development in the region.
To meet the increasing challenges of climate protection and climate change adaptation, the Yarinacocha district administration has developed an action program in collaboration with their German Partner City Cologne. This program includes the planning and implementation of improvement measures in areas such as the provision of municipal, climate and environmentally relevant basic services, the use of renewable energies, the preservation of biodiversity and local economic development through value chains. The district administration is working on building appropriate planning and project management capacities in the administration and establishing mechanisms to increase the participation of relevant interest groups from civil society, in particular indigenous actors, and universities, in local planning and decision-making processes. To support these objectives, an expert is supporting the district administration and the climate partnership between Yarinacocha and Cologne in the framework of the program “Experts fund for Municipal Partnerships Wordwide”, which is implemented by GIZ and SKEW.
In this good practice partnership-based cooperation with indigenous communities and their organizations as well as the commitment of political decision-makers are important success factors, e.g. to set up a center for indigenous medicine in Yarinacocha or to implement projects benefitting the indigenous population in the areas of local governance, biodiversity, and autonomous indigenous energy supply.
