Scientists and government officials are collaborating with communities to test out new approaches to reversing land degradation—methods that might have potential to change the status of the entire highlands region from vastly degraded to successfully restored.
From IUCN Water. The Tana River, Kenya's Liveline. The Tana, Kenya's longest river, flows for over 1,000 kms with a catchment area of 95,000 km² (roughly the size of Portugal). The River Basin has significant development opportunities for hydropower, domestic water provision, and irrigation - planned as part of Kenya's Vision for 2030.
If we utilize our water better upstream, what will happen downstream? Will water availability decrease? Is watershed improvement a zero-sum game with the gains upstream deducted from the situation downstream, or is it an overall system improvement? Or if we take a broader view of water-related ecosystems services, how does more intense upstream water use have an impact on all relevant ecosystem services in the entire area? Who are the winners and who are the losers? Frank van Steenbergen, Tesfa-alem Gebreegziabher Embaye and Eyasu Hagos take a crack at answering these questions.
A a new tool, still under development, will 'triangulate' available plant traits linked to ecosystem processes to guide restoration efforts while facilitating to practitioners’ and other relevant stakeholders' selection of locally adapted species for restoring ecosystem services.
Water wars have been announced by media and policy analysts over the last twenty years and the Nile has always been one of the rivers spotted as “up for grab”. However, in spite of these prophecies what we have been mostly witnessing is a process of difficult, uneven, slow, sometimes contradictory but still peaceful negotiation among the riparian countries.
Responding to a demand from local decision makers, researchers have developed a water allocation model that can shed light on current and future water availability in the Ruaha watershed in Tanzania.
Users of wetlands in the Nile River basin are increasingly confronted with tough trade-offs, as wetland areas become overexploited, deteriorate and ultimately fail to provide the benefits that communities and ecosystems depend on.
In the Gash Spate Irrigation Scheme of Sudan, farmers are able to cultivate watermelon as a second crop in the end of October – long after the rains have fallen and the floods have been diverted. So where does the water come from?
The Nile Water Lab is a new web platform that presents a wide range of views on irrigation projects along the Nile, both views from people on the ground and views that are usually hidden away in policy reports and journal articles.
The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) held a gender mainstreaming workshop in cooperation with WLE and FAO in Cairo, Egypt.
New research indicates that the number of people at risk of malaria around dams, and associated reservoirs, in sub-Saharan Africa will nearly double to around 25 million by 2080.