The Inter-American Development Bank has approved an $850,000 technical cooperation grant to finance the development of a national waterway plan in Peru that will allow sustainable development and commercial use of the country’s river network, the Bank said in a statement on Wednesday.
The National Plan for Waterways Development aims to provide efficient and safe means of transportation in Peru’s rivers while improving the country’s regional integration, the IDB said.
The plan is the first one of its kind in Peru. It will be applied as part of the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America. The IIRSA is a forum that seeks to link South American countries through the development of transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructure.
The plan’s development will have four activities. It will prepare an economic and environmental diagnosis of the existing main commercial waterway network; analyze the development opportunities of the current network based on other international experiences; create an action plan for the waterway network; and develop a social and environmental conceptual framework for the project based on the IIRSA’s Strategic Environmental and Social Assessment Methodology.
The Amazon River and its tributaries are the backbone of Peru’s waterway network. The total length of the river network is 14,000 kilometers, or some 8,700 miles. Peru’s Main Network of Commercial Waterways account for 4,000 km, approximately 2,500 miles.
