A Restoration Effort in Southcentral Chile Aims to Renew a Damaged Wetland

Luisa Valenzuela, an environmental advocate in southcentral Chile, vividly recalls the moment she found her calling. It was a spring day 18 years ago when, from the doorstep of her home in Hualpén, she watched a pair of ducks flap their wings desperately at a truck illegally dumping debris into the Vasco Da Gama-Chimalfe, a wetland that abuts her neighborhood. She suspected the birds were protecting their eggs or chicks. “That day I promised the wetland that I would become the voice for the species that live there,” she says. 

Valenzuela founded the Vasco Da Gama-Chimalfe Wetland Defense Committee and dedicated her life to safeguarding the habitat, which is part of a larger network of coastal wetlands in and around Concepción, Chile’s second-largest city after Santiago. The Rocuant-Andalién–Vasco Da Gama–Paicaví–Tucapel Bajo Wetland System spans 11 square miles and is under threat from industrial expansion, urban development, and pollution, all of which have drastically reduced its size. “What we see today is just a remnant of a once-vast wetland,” says Heraldo Norambuena, a biologist specializing in natural resource management at the Universidad Santo Tomás. 

As a result, there’s less habitat available for birds that have long depended on the wetlands, from residents like Yellow-billed Pintails to vulnerable Lesser Yellowlegs that fly here from northern Alaska. “Returning to these sites is part of their historical memory,” Norambuena says.

This habitat loss has also undermined the ecosystem’s role as a natural buffer against floods, says Octavio Rojas, a disaster risk management expert at Universidad de Concepción. Today, urban infrastructure prevents rainwater from seeping out across the landscape and being absorbed. This has left metropolitan areas vulnerable to flooding, a hazard that is likely becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change—with deadly consequences. Swollen rivers from heavy rainfall in June 2023, for instance, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents in south and central Chile and killed two people. 

A new $147 million wetland revitalization project aims to turn things around. The project is a pilot of the Americas Flyways Initiative (AFI), a collaboration between Audubon, BirdLife International, and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean. Harnessing a mix of funding and working with communities, AFI has set out to facilitate 30 nature-based economic development projects that protect and restore critical ecosystems by 2050.

Starting with southcentral Chile, the initiative aims to increase the connectivity and conservation of sites crucial to migratory birds, which are experiencing widespread population declines. Renewing the wetland system’s natural ability to mitigate flooding will also benefit residents. “It’s a win-win,” says Santiago Aparicio, director at the Americas Flyways Initiative for Audubon. “By protecting birds, we ensure better conditions for other species—including ourselves.”

New Appreciation for an Undervalued Landscape

For decades, wetlands in the communities of Hualpén, Concepción, Talcahuano, and Penco were considered worthless land. Development advanced over them, filling them in to make way for roads, ports, Carriel Sur International Airport, and industrial zones.

Yet these ecosystems play important roles. They help mitigate climate change by storing carbon. They regulate ecological balance: After Chile’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the Rocuant-Andalién wetland in Talcahuano buffered the impact of the resulting tsunami, some researchers maintain. And even though they are diminished, their diverse habitats—which includes marshes, swamps, riparian zones, and estuaries—support an array of coastal and marshland bird species. The Rocuant-Andalién wetland, home to American Oystercatchers and 150 other birds, is of such importance to avian conservation that BirdLife International designated it a global Important Bird and Biodiversity Area in 2021.

Without legal protection, urban planning has long overlooked the region’s wetlands—but local communities haven’t. For years, neighborhood groups, including Valenzuela’s, have been clamoring for greater habitat protection. They’ve promoted community science to monitor the ecosystems, filed environmental complaints, and raised awareness through neighborhood tours and school workshops.

In 2019, a regional municipal coalition succeeded in having the wetland system declared a priority site for conservation—a designation that promotes protective measures but doesn’t preclude development. The following year, boosted by widespread public support, Chile enacted the Urban Wetlands Law, which allows the national government to designate wetlands within city limits. The law aims to stop indiscriminate real estate development in those habitats and integrate them into city planning for flood mitigation, recreation, biodiversity, and other factors. 

Against this backdrop the Americas Flyways Initiative assembled a consulting team to figure out which interventions would have the greatest benefit. The group included hydrologists, disaster risk specialists like Rojas, biologists like Norambuena, and community leaders such as Valenzuela. They knew, says team leader Carolina Rojas, that to get buy-in from locals and private landowners, they would have to integrate the wetlands into the urban matrix in ways that balanced community needs, including additional housing and access to public space. “AFI does not seek to impose restrictive barriers,” says Rojas, who is a geographer with the Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, a Chilean research organization. 

At the same time, Octavio Rojas says, the primary goal is to restore the system’s water flows “to give back its sponge-like capacity.”

In weighing their options for doing so, the team drew largely on two studies by Chile’s Ministry of the Environment: one that identified zones most in need of restoration, and another that outlined a land-use plan to build system-wide resilience. 

Ultimately they proposed three floodable parks across the wetland system. To slow runoff and allow water to more readily soak into the ground, each area will contain green infrastructure such as rebuilt natural contours and native vegetation. A mix of restored habitats will support resident and migratory birds alike. People, meanwhile, will enjoy new open spaces and trails—and greater safety from extreme flooding amid an increasingly chaotic climate.

While not all of the areas identified are currently protected under the urban wetland law, the AFI team hopes that the ecological and societal benefits that restoration promises will encourage their designation.

Loretto Arriagada, coastal resilience conservation manager in Chile for Audubon’s Latin America and the Caribbean program, is quick to point out that restoring wetlands provides economic benefits, too: reduced flood damage, more bird tourism, and carbon offsets generated by natural storage of CO2. Such benefits are significant—and so is the work that it will take to achieve them. 

A Better Home for Birds

In early March, Arriagada and wildlife conservationist and photographer Katherine Sanhueza Bravo drive to one of the most threatened areas that migratory birds rely on, according to AFI’s analysis. The Rocuant-Andalién wetland contains some of the healthiest intact habitat, but decades of neglect and abuse have significantly degraded the natural landscape in a portion called Carriel Norte, where Greater Concepción is encroaching. But it’s not just urban growth threatening this sector. An active industrial zone brings persistent problems: garbage accumulation, stray dogs that prey on birds, poor waste management.

“Look at how the wetland has been filled in,” says Arriagada. Ahead lies a maze of landfills that have multiplied over time, forming up to 15-foot-high mounds of sand over what were once reedbeds.  

Even among these artificial hills, amid piles of dirt and cement, birds persist. Southern Lapwings, with white chests and black crowns, wander unfazed by the constant truck traffic. Lesser and Greater Yellowlegs feed on macroinvertebrates in the riverbed, fattening up in preparation for their impending journey north. In the distance, canals connected to marshland play seasonal host to Hudsonian Godwits and Whimbrels. Their calls, says Sanhueza, are like the soundtrack of the wetland system.

Like many people in the region, Sanhueza didn’t know she lived on a wetland—until she read a sign while biking through Rocuant-Andalién on her way to university. “When people’s homes flood in winter, they see it as a problem,” she says. “But once they understand the wetland, they realize restoring it actually helps reduce flooding.”

Sanhueza has made it her mission to help others discover these hidden ecosystems. She founded a bird guide company, Chile Birds, to spread enthusiasm for the wetland and the birds it supports—even in a diminished state. “Birds are stubborn,” she says. Humans are too, she adds—many remain in the neighborhoods surrounding Carriel Norte despite the flooding and pollution. 

Arriagada nods, then notes there’s a key difference. Birds are resilient, but they can’t address the threats to the habitat they depend on. “It’s our responsibility to manage and reduce them—to stop degrading these ecosystems,” she says.

As AFI restores crucial wetland habitat in the coming years, it could mark a major turning point in bringing about that change.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2025 issue as “Natural Allies.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.