Territorial Inequality, Watershed Risk Governance and Conservation Capacity-Building in Chilean Peripheral Regions

Abstract

Watersheds and coastal ecosystems are connected through hydrological, geological, ecological and social processes. In Chile, this land–sea continuum is exposed to earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activity and mass movements, while territorial inequalities shape the institutional capacity to prevent, prepare for and recover from socionatural disasters. This article examines whether the regional distribution of disaster events, administrative alerts, managed resources and disaster-related training in educational establishments suggests coherence or mismatch in preventive capacity-building. A quantitative, descriptive and inferential design was applied using secondary aggregate data from EM-DAT and SENAPRED for Chilean regions. Non-parametric analyses were used because variables did not follow normal distributions. Results show that central–southern regions, especially Maule, Biobío and Araucanía, experience high disaster recurrence and human impact, while the association between alerts and trained establishments remains weak (Spearman’s rho = 0.12), as does the association between alerts and managed resources (rho = 0.17). The study argues that unequal preventive capacity-building can weaken integrated watershed and coastal conservation because risk governance, biodiversity protection and ecosystem-based management depend on territorially differentiated institutional capacities. Prevention should therefore move from formally homogeneous coverage toward substantive territorial equity.