FUNCAGUA — Guatemala City's Legally Established Water Fund

FUNCAGUA (Fundación para la Conservación del Agua de la Región Metropolitana) is Guatemala's first legally established water fund, created with technical and financial support from The Nature Conservancy and a coalition of corporate partners including Coca-Cola FEMSA, PepsiCo and others. Registered as a foundation in 2017 after several years of preparatory work from 2011, FUNCAGUA channels public-private financing into conservation of the watersheds that supply Guatemala City's metropolitan region, home to more than 3 million people.

Corporate founding partners helped mobilise roughly Q5 million (about US$675,000) in seed capital to launch pilot conservation and reforestation projects protecting soils and forests, with an initial focus on the Xayá-Pixcaya sub-basin in Chimaltenango department, one of the four external sub-basins supplying the metropolitan area. A joint Coca-Cola-TNC initiative restored and conserved 243.23 hectares in that watershed, and FUNCAGUA's broader partner network has since worked across more than 1,450 hectares of priority conservation areas, including 15 hectares of forest restoration in the Teocinte and Las Cañas micro-watersheds.

FUNCAGUA publishes an annual public "Informe del Agua" and runs the "Verde más agua" monitoring platform tracking forest cover and water indicators, and it protects three water springs used for community supply. Reporting the strongest single-company figure, Coca-Cola FEMSA Guatemala said that in 2025 it returned more than 800 million litres of water to nature - over 100% of the volume used in its Guatemalan operations - while conserving 550-plus hectares, though this figure covers one bottler's company-wide water balance rather than FUNCAGUA's fund-wide watershed outcomes specifically.

As with most corporate water funds, FUNCAGUA's reported hectares and litres figures come from the fund and its corporate partners' own monitoring rather than an independent scientific audit, and no peer-reviewed streamflow or sediment study isolating FUNCAGUA's watershed effect from other land-use changes in the metropolitan basin has been published. The fund's legal and institutional structure, however - a registered foundation with public annual reporting, now nine years into implementation - is more mature than many pilot-stage watershed funds.

Read the full analysis: https://funcagua.org.gt/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Informe-del-agua-2022-version-digital.pdf