Water availability for plants in the Guatemala metro area
- Municipal intelligence for siting
- The country, department by department
- Audited
Six municipalities - Guatemala, Mixco, Villa Nueva, San Miguel Petapa, Chinautla and San Pedro Sacatepéquez - are under extreme water stress: fewer than 500 m³ per person per year available against the 1,700 m³ needed, according to Prensa Libre (1 February 2021) citing the Metropolitan Conservation Plan, which described regional supply as 50% surface sources / 50% mechanical wells, possibly moving to 35/65 in the dry season; in the Las Vacas micro-watershed, 40 times more water is extracted than the ground infiltrates, and 38% of the water is lost to illegal connections, theft and leaks. There is no water law regulating well drilling and the number of private wells is unknown; the '35-45% of water comes from private wells' and '>3,000 boreholes' figures that circulated have no source (contradiction #29 in the index). Implication: in the metropolitan ring, reliable industrial supply means your own well plus a drilling right negotiated with the municipality; in Escuintla availability is greater, but the municipal figure is not published.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Figures
- Water availability, municipalities under extreme stress
- <500 m³/person/year vs 1,700 m³ needed
- Water losses (leaks, theft, illegal connections)
- 38%
Caveat
Sources
Organizations named in the answer
Related records
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.