Green Earth Africa

How can we secure a future for the people living on the front line of climate change? In Eastern Africa, environmental scientist Katharine Cross is helping to safeguard water resources that are becoming more and more unpredictable.

Climate change is already taking its toll in Eastern Africa. Even the snow caps of the iconic Mount Kilimanjaro are receding and are projected to disappear by 2025. In many areas, increasing populations and an ever-increasing demand for water are leading to conflicts over resources.

Katharine’s expertise as an environmental scientist, particularly in groundwater and river basin management, is being put to good use in the region. She and her colleagues are involved in a variety of projects across Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Kenya which focus on strengthening institutions to better manage water resources between the different users such as farmers, hydropower companies and pastoralists.

They identify ways to adapt to climate change impacts which can include finding alternative sources of livelihood, rehabilitating river banks and improving dialogue between users to share water resources more equally. The aim is to make sure there is enough water in the region’s rivers to service all needs, as well as sustain the natural environment.

Through close collaboration with IUCN’s Drylands Programme, the Water and Wetlands Programme for which Katharine works uses an integrated approach which considers aspects such as rangeland management within water catchment areas. This means working with governments and communities to plan how water resources are used and shared within a catchment and beyond to the wider ecosystem.

Change takes time, especially when it involves changing the way natural resources are managed and governed. IUCN has worked for many years in the Pangani River Basin which is shared between Kenya and Tanzania and momentum is building.

Katharine says the highlights of her work include working with governments in various countries and being able to influence the way water resources are managed and really helping people cope with climate change in practical ways.

Many of the lessons and best practices from different projects are being applied by the government, specifically in Tanzania and Uganda, in other river basins, and they are also being scaled-up to other projects where IUCN is involved in the wider Eastern and Southern Africa region.

The importance of Water from WWF on Vimeo.

Of all the water on this blue planet of ours, only 3% of it is freshwater. And this precious, life-giving resource has seen a decline of 35% in the species that live within its realm since 1970. We must use water more wisely. We must make better use of the bounties and services that it provides. 

Find out where you fit in, and how you can help: wwf.panda.org/water

Mr Beltran lives in northern Nicaragua, one of the poorest and driest areas of the country, where a pilot project to harvest rainwater is beginning to transform local agriculture and local people’s lives.

“Farmers have come from other parts of the country to see what is happening here. I no longer depend on seasonal rainfall. I produce three times more maize and have a surplus to trade,” says Mr Beltran.

The project involves building earthen dams to form reservoirs or ponds that can collect surface water run-off from the hills during the rainy season.

The water is then used for irrigation during periods of drought.

“The problem in Nicaragua and the majority of tropical areas in Latin America is that you have a huge contrast between the rainy and the dry season,” says Gonzalo Zorrilla, who is directing the project.

“In Nicaragua’s case, you have a lot of rain for six months and then six months when there is practically none.”

Catching the rain

The idea for the initiative stemmed from work in southern Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay by the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR) and supported by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

In these countries, more than 1m hectares (2.5m acres) of rice have been irrigated with water collected by the farmers themselves.

“With our partners in Nicaragua, the local rice farmers’ association, we thought it could be possible to use the same technology to help small farmers in the tropics,” said Mr Zorrilla.

“We convinced a UN agency, the Common Fund for Commodities, CFC, to fund the project.”

The idea is to construct the reservoirs as cheaply and simply as possible.

A dam is built between two hillsides to catch the rainwater run-off and create a pool of water.

An outlet tube reinforced with steel bars lies underneath the dam, so all the farmer has to do to irrigate his crops is open the valve.

“If you go anywhere in northern Costa Rica, Panama or Nicaragua, there is massive unemployment during six months of the year. People have no income, no crops, and in severe cases their cattle are dying,” says Edward Pulver, agricultural scientist at FLAR.

When the project started, he says, many farmers were not optimistic about their future.

“But as soon as we started mentioning irrigation, their eyes lit up like Christmas tree lights because they had hope.

“They saw they didn’t have to be poor, there was a way out. It is incredibly impressive to see that.”

Fourteen dams have been completed or are being built in Nicaragua, and similar projects are under way in Costa Rica and southern Mexico.

“We are getting the same yields of maize in Nicaragua that you get in the Midwest in the US,” says Mr Pulver.

“Fresh corn was not available in the dry season. Now, because of irrigation, some farmers sell their whole production as fresh corn for human consumption,” says Mr Zorrilla.

This means a potential income of several thousand dollars per hectare, an amount that was “completely unimaginable in the past”, according to Mr Zorrilla.

The project has also helped farmers to vary their diet, as some of them have introduced a small fish, tilapia, to the reservoirs.

Farming’s future?

Many countries in Latin America, including Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Costa Rica have the right topography and conditions to harvest water, says Mr Pulver.

“In Latin America we have excess water. Our problem is we have flooding, so if we can just capture this water, store it and plant crops during the dry season, we can feed ourselves very easily.

“This technology can work in the poorest of countries, and the CFC wants us to take the idea to Africa.”

A key aim of the pilot project, which ends in 2012, is to train local people and officials so they can build their own dams and reservoirs.

“If we finish with just 14 dams in Nicaragua, nothing would have change there because too few farmers would have benefited,” says Mr Zorrilla.

“Globally, despite the challenges of growing populations, water is really under used.

“The intelligent, sustainable use of water could give rise to a water revolution, a blue revolution,” he says.

One key factor seems already guaranteed: the conviction of the farmers themselves.

“If you expand access to this technology, you can help to lessen the impact drought has in Nicaragua,” says Mr Beltran.

“Farmers can have a balanced diet, money for their farm and for their children’s education. On my farm, there’s now work for four of us.

“This project has really changed the way we think.”

Foreign investors aren’t just after land in Africa. Access to water is essential – which can bring them into direct competition with the needs of local communities

Passengers in a pirogue watch Fulani herders cross the Niger river with their cattle on the outskirts of Mopti, Mali. Photograph: Florin Iorganda/Reuters

As the Earth warms and the world’s population grows, competition for dwindling supplies of fresh water will intensify. As the biggest industrial user of water, the energy sector can either fight to maintain its share, or learn to conserve.

The stakes are high. As Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, put it, “water is the new oil.”

For utilities especially, water is precious. They use it most of all to cool steam generators that may be driven by coal, natural gas, nuclear or even solar energy.

In 2008, at least one nuclear reactor, inAlabama, shut down briefly because water supplies dried up during the great Southeast drought that summer. Reactors in Western Europe shut down during the 2006 heat wave and were threatened by asharp drop in river levels again this year.

Most climate models predict that the drought-stricken Southwestern United States will grow even drier and hotter–like Texas–as global warming progresses. That will harm the energy sector along with agriculture, tourism and recreation, and many other kinds of industry.

“The competition between water and energy needs represents a critical business, security, and environmental issue, but it has not yet received the attention that it deserves,” said Diana Glassman, co-author of a report by the World Policy Institute and EBG Capital on “The Water-Energy Nexus.”

“Energy production consumes significant amounts of water, and vice versa. In a world where water scarcity is a major and growing challenge, water deserves a place on the energy agenda alongside cost, carbon and security considerations.”

The report notes that coal- and oil-fired power plants use twice as much water as natural gas-fired plants. Nuclear plants use three times as much.

Some of the biggest water hogs are oil extractors, according to the report. Mining the thick tar sands of Canada may require 20 times more water than conventional oil drilling. In parts of parched south and west Texas, natural gas fracking may be curtailed due to lack of water.

Renewable energy isn’t exempt from this problem. Although wind and solar photovoltaic plants use little or no water, water-cooled solar thermal plants use five times as much as gas-fired plants. (Some solar thermal producers, like BrightSource Energy, have switched to air cooling to save water at their desert sites, despite the loss of some generating efficiency.)

And biofuels fermented from soybeans or corn “can consume thousands of times more water than traditional oil drilling, primarily through irrigation,” according to the World Resources Institute.

The best solutions—because they carry so many benefits—are programs to conserve energy and water consumption. Water-related users in California account for about 19 percent of the state’s electricity consumption, so every gallon saved through drip irrigation or improved industrial processes saves energy. Similarly, every kilowatt-hour saved means less need to build or operate power plants that use precious water.

PG&E and other utilities are also installing new air or “dry” cooling systems on their power plants that save more than 90 percent of the water required by traditional “wet” cooling.

Last but not least, wind and solar photovoltaic plants will help out as they replace traditional fossil generation. A thousand megawatts of wind power can save 1.3 billion gallons of water annually, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Some crops require water-hungry irrigation systems to thrive, but what is the thirstiest crop of all?

A farmer harvests cucumbers at a greenhouse in Algarrobo, near Malaga. Photo: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images

The IUCN Water Programme recently engaged in a partnership on sustainable sanitation and water management, to share knowledge and contribute to a new comprehensive toolbox which links water management, sanitation, and agriculture.

For many decades water managers have dealt with protecting, storing, distributing, and cleaning water. Many of these activities link closely with sanitation provision and treatment. Linking the knowledge between these different water management functions and processes is often complex, due to institutional and scientific boundaries. Nutrients in the water which flow between people, the environment, and industrial processes can be precious resources providing valuable ecosystem services. Equally, nutrients and other substances can often pollute and cause damage, and this needs to be recognised and managed to minimise pollution, especially from land into freshwater, and from freshwater systems into the marine environment.

The Sustainable Sanitation and Water Management (SSWM) Toolbox and its partner network bring together information, advice and knowledge on a range of topics designed to save and recycle water, regain resources and protect aquatic ecosystems. The Toolbox allows users to find all the relevant information in one location, and provides a range of information for practitioners from process and planning tools, software and technological approaches, diagnostic and implementation tools as well as training courses.

“We see collaboration with key user groups in the Toolbox as an excellent means of sharing the many practical lessons IUCN has from around the world on how to implement IWRM to benefit both people and nature”, said Mark Smith, IUCN Water Programme Director.

The website links all the different tools with publications, articles and weblinks, case studies, training material and presentations. Targeted at local level water practitioners, the Toolbox is also a valuable asset for international and research organisations, NGO’s, local leaders and municipalities, business and environmental agencies.

“We value the experience of the IUCN Water Programme on toolkit development and the hybrid subjects they deal with such as environmental flows, payments for ecosystem services and water governance. Integrating this thinking into the existing Toolbox will help further strengthen the information we have, and help in the urgently needed upgrade in how we manage our water and our reliance on it for drinking, sanitation, and food production” saidJohannes Heeb, CEO of Seecon International.

Katharina Conradin, SSWM project leader, added that “other partners such as UNDP, ICLEI, WSSCC, and IWA have joined and contributed to our work. We are very pleased to now also include IUCN’s expertise, particularly on the topic of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), into our toolbox and incorporate the concept more comprehensively in the sanitation and water management approach.”

In order to further position the SSWM Toolbox as a reference for capacity development in the water and sanitation sector, feedback on the SSWM Toolbox is welcomed to discuss its strengths and weaknesses, as well as the way forward for further ensuring its applicability by professionals and stakeholders from within and outside the sector.

Seecon international gmbh is the implementing organisation in the development of the toolbox, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the German Agency for International Cooperation and Capacity Building for Integrated Water Resources Management.

ALGAE are being put to work performing a unique double duty: cleaning up sewage waste while simultaneously producing biofuel.

Clean fuel (Image: A. Sue Weisler/RIT)

All algae feast on phosphates and nitrogen-containing compounds, converting them to lipids. Some of these oils can be converted to biofuel, but only a few algal species produce lipids of the right type and quantity to be easily converted to fuel. In theory, though, algae are a perfect renewable fuel source. The main obstacle is that brewing the right nutrient mix can be prohibitively expensive.

Now, in work for a master’s thesis, Eric Lannan, a mechanical engineer at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York and colleagues have identified three types of microalgae - Scenedesmus, Chlorella andChlamydomonas - that efficiently convert nutrients to fuel on a diet of municipal waste water, while happily living in its harsh, salty environment. In a lab test, it took just three days for the algae to gobble up 99 per cent of the ammonia, 88 per cent of the nitrate and 99 per cent of the phosphates in a broth resembling that from a domestic sewage treatment plant, turning themselves into rich sources of fuel even as they purified the water.

“People had looked at algae to clean waste water, others to make biodiesel,” Lannan says. “We’re putting those ideas together.”

In a few months, Lannan’s group plans to install a 4000-litre pond at a waste-water treatment plant near Rochester. F. Drew Smith, who heads compliance for the area’s treatment plants, believes it is an experiment worth trying, as algae could yield several times more biodiesel than crops grown on the same amount of land (see Illustration).

Jeff Lodge, a microbiologist at RIT, says the process should be economically feasible for treating up to 200,000 litres of waste water a day – the load of a typical rural US treatment plant. “We can treat the water and yield enough clean biodiesel for a rural area to run a fleet of trucks,” he says.

The process has two phases. During the first three days, the algae produce lipids. Then, once the waste water is depleted of nitrogen and phosphates, the algae respond to starvation by turning their reserve nutrient stores into even more lipids.

After six days, the algae can be harvested. The team plans to use a mechanical pressing method to extract the oil, leaving behind biomass that could be composted, fed into an anaerobic digester to make methane, or sold as a feedstock to make ethanol.

There are limitations, though. In order to work year-round, the ponds must be heated in winter. For this, the team suggests using waste heat from the treatment plant. Too many sunny days in a row can also slow production, as algae divert resources into producing protection from the rays.

And large treatment plants need to process and discharge water quickly; accommodating a pond in which algae-infused waste water sits for six days could be a problem.

Smith says his biggest plant, which processes nearly 390 million litres a day, could accommodate a pond about the size of a small swimming pool to start with. “If the algae process turns out to be highly productive, we can certainly find enough land,” he says.