Guillermo Mendoza, Marc Tkach and John Kucharski published this brief 4-page article in the current (January-February 2022) issue of Water Resources IMPACT (volume 24, no. 1 - click here to download the entire issue):
Download Water Resources IMPACT Mendoza 2022
Here is a brief introduction.
To call water risk management in sub-Saharan Africa difficult is an understatement. And the difficulty has concrete consequences for economic well-being and public health. A 2018 World Bank assessment of Zimbabwe’s irrigation sector showed that annual gross domestic product (GDP) is highly correlated with annual rainfall. Even under normal conditions, the correlation of economic productivity with rainfall makes development spotty and unreliable in poorer sub-Saharan countries.
When disaster strikes, matters are worse. Countries like Zimbabwe have fewer resources to support the collection of high-resolution, longer-term datasets and have limited technical and institutional capacity to help them respond to water-related disasters. What is more, poorer countries are disproportionately impacted by such disasters. If an essential purpose of water resources management is to translate variable hydrology into reliable benefits for a community, then water management in many sub-Saharan African countries has failed.
The Iolanda Water Treatment Plant (IWTP) serves nearly 1 million residents in and around Lusaka, Zambia. Although the Millennium Challenge Corporation has helped address the plant’s chronic performance failures, future impacts of climate change will require further investment. Source: Photo by Chipili Chikamba, MCA-Zambia.
Climate change adds a new dimension of complexity to the problem. The challenge is not to develop better climate science tools. Plenty of effective tools are available. It is, rather, to incorporate climate change into the planning process in a pragmatic, transparent, and justifiable way.Part of the difficulty lies in the haziness of current predictions. As Johan Grijsen noted in a report for the World Bank, climate change runoff projections vary wildly—from 20% increases to 20% decreases. This presents a challenge for planners and decision makers. How can we make informed decisions about a future that is so uncertain? Water resource managers working to develop resilient water utilities in sub-Saharan Africa are planning under additional pressures as well: they face an uncertain future, weak available data, a narrow time frame, and severe budgetary constraints.
But there are ways forward. By piloting a bottom-up, community-oriented approach to planning for water infrastructure resilience, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is taking this challenge head on.
Building Resilience from the Bottom Up
The MCC is a U.S. foreign assistance agency that provides grants to impoverished countries to build infrastructure and reduce poverty. For countries in Africa, where 490 million people live in extreme poverty, grants from organizations like the MCC are crucial for addressing the challenge of water management. The Iolanda Water Treatment Plant (IWTP) for the city of Lusaka, Zambia, is a prime example of MCC investments in action. The plant serves almost 1 million residents. But over the years it has faced chronic performance failures driven by droughts and the condition of local water resources infrastructure. This has led to uneven service reliability, which dips to between 60 and 70% when the dry season ends between October and December. This, in turn, drives up the incidence of waterborne diseases because as water is rationed, communities turn to untreated alternative sources of water or they store water at the household level, where it is at higher risk of getting contaminated.
A conceptual schematic of the Iolanda Water Treatment Plant system. Source: Authors.
To address these infrastructural and public health issues, the MCC was asked to step in. The MCC’s project to rehabilitate IWTP pipelines, intakes, and facilities cost around $57.9 million. Early returns on this baseline investment were clear: the MCC’s efforts increased reliability to 90% and higher in critical months.
But in addition to the challenges of today, the MCC began planning for an uncertain tomorrow. In particular, the MCC was interested in investments that would enhance the IWTP’s resilience to future drought impacts resulting from climate change. It would need to conduct a resilience study in only a few months, on a limited budget, with thin data. To do so, the MCC piloted the use of Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA), a planning guide endorsed by the Intergovernmental Hydrology Programme (IHP) that brings together scientific modeling and the input of local communities to develop more resilient water systems in the face of climate change.
One the chief advantages of planning with CRIDA is its bottom-up approach. When beginning from a set of climate change projections, planners can quickly find themselves overwhelmed by cascading uncertainties. CRIDA allows planners to sidestep this difficulty by beginning with the water-related issues that keep planners awake at night. Doing so, planners maximize the strategic value of less-than-certain climate change projections rather than being paralyzed by them.
The above has no doubt whetted your appetite; finish by reading the PDF:
Download Water Resources IMPACT Mendoza 2022
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