Quantifying the Sustainability of Water Availability for the Water-Food-Energy-Ecosystem Nexus in the Niger River Basin.

Jie Yang,Y C Ethan Yang,Frank Van Weert,Claudia Ringler,Ousmane Seidou,Andrew Ogilvie,Rebecca Tharme,Hassaan F Khan,Hua Xie,Abdouramane Gado Djibo

doi:10.1029/2018ef000923

Abstract

Water, food, energy, and the ecosystems they depend on interact with each other in highly complex and interlinked ways. These interdependencies can be traced particularly well in the context of a river basin, which is delineated by hydrological boundaries. The interactions are shaped by humans interacting with nature, and as such, a river basin can be characterized as a complex, coupled socioecological system. The Niger River Basin in West Africa is such a system, where water infrastructure development to meet growing water, food, and energy demands may threaten a productive and vulnerable basin ecosystem. These dynamic interactions remain poorly understood. Trade‐off analyses between different sectors and at different spatial scales are needed to support solution‐oriented policy analysis, particularly in transboundary basins. This study assesses the impact of climate and human/anthropogenic changes on the water, energy, food, and ecosystem sectors and characterizes the resulting trade‐offs through a set of generic metrics related to the sustainability of water availability. Results suggest that dam development can mitigate negative impacts from climate change on hydropower generation and also on ecosystem health to some extent.

Highlights

Supplying sufficient water, food, and energy while maintaining environmental sustainability is a growing challenge due to rapid population growth, changing lifestyles, ecosystem degradation, increasing water scarcity, political rather than analysis-based, cross-sectoral decision-making, and an uncertain future climate (World Bank, 2016; World Economic Forum, 2017)
The agent-based model (ABM)-Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model does not simulate rain-fed crops and flood recession rice production, especially in the Inner Niger Delta, and irrigated crop area is currently relatively small
Joint Impact of Climate Change and Water Infrastructure Development Using the findings described in the previous sections, we conducted a climate stress test (Brown et al, 2012) on the sustainability of water availability for crop production, hydropower generation, and ecosystem health and evaluated the effect on dam development at the same time

Summary

Introduction

Food, and energy while maintaining environmental sustainability is a growing challenge due to rapid population growth, changing lifestyles, ecosystem degradation, increasing water scarcity, political rather than analysis-based, cross-sectoral decision-making, and an uncertain future climate (World Bank, 2016; World Economic Forum, 2017). Many West African countries are facing such challenges as the population in the region is expected to increase almost threefold between 1990 and 2030 to reach 516 million people (United Nations, 2015). The transboundary Niger River Basin is vast, flowing through four, but draining runoff from nine West African countries. Local ecosystem health is fragile and adversely affected by growing water and land degradation, while at the same time governments are pushing for large reservoir development to meet growing water supply, food, and energy needs as well as to control the high interannual variability in water availability

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Discussion

Conclusion