Abstract
Malawi depends on Lake Malawi outflows into the Shire River for its water, energy and food (WEF) security. We explore future WEF security risks under the combined impacts of climate change and ambitious development pathways for water use expansion. We drive a bespoke water resources model developed with stakeholder inputs, with 29 bias-corrected climate model projections, alongside stakeholder elicited development pathways, and examine impacts on stakeholder-elicited WEF sector performance metrics. Using scenario analysis, we stress-test the system, explore uncertainties, assess trade-offs between satisfying WEF metrics, and explore whether planned regulation of outflows could help satisfy metrics. While uncertainty from potential future rainfall change generates a wide range of outcomes (including no lake outflow and higher frequency of major downstream floods), we find that potential irrigation expansion in the Lake Malawi catchments could enhance the risk of very low lake levels and risk to Shire River hydropower and irrigation infrastructure performance. Improved regulation of lake outflows through the upgraded barrage does offer some risk mitigation, but trade-offs emerge between lake level management and downstream WEF sector requirements. These results highlight the need to balance Malawi's socio-economic development ambitions across sectors and within a lake-river system, alongside enhanced climate resilience.This article is part of the theme issue 'Developing resilient energy systems'.
Highlights
Malawi’s recent ‘Vision 2063’ national development plan relies on similar reasoning and assumptions to focus on agriculture production, energy infrastructure and urbanization as key elements underpinning long-term sustainable development [6]
We explore the interactions between development pathways and climate change uncertainty, for a least developed country (LDC) context in Africa; Malawi
We focus on the transboundary Lake Malawi Shire River Basin (LMSRB) that supports greater than 90% of Malawi’s hydropower and irrigation, water supply for its growing population, and environmental flows for an important biodiverse wetland, the Elephant Marsh, before the Shire River joins the Zambezi River
Summary
Water-energy-food (WEF) nexus thinking has resonated with academics and stakeholders alike, despite the varied analytical frameworks, approaches and methods employed [1]. Engaging with sectoral/multi-sectoral stakeholders to make development plans more resilient to climate change-related risks using DMUU approaches is crucial; African examples of such approaches across the WEF nexus at a river basin scale are limited. We focus on the transboundary Lake Malawi Shire River Basin (LMSRB) that supports greater than 90% of Malawi’s hydropower and irrigation, water supply for its growing population, and environmental flows for an important biodiverse wetland, the Elephant Marsh, before the Shire River joins the Zambezi River. We use a Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) model developed with inputs and insights from multi-sectoral stakeholders [13] to analyse cross-sectoral risks. (2) To what extent can regulating lake outflows help manage risks to stakeholder-identified hydropower and irrigation infrastructure, and environmental flow requirements in the Shire River, under uncertain changes in climate and upstream water use?.
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