Water & Environmental Change in Africa

The issues on water development that we touched on during the posts such as groundwater, land-use changes, food security, sanitation and management techniques by community or private sector are long standing issues beyond their relation to environmental change. As the literature reviews have shown there are many causes for the current issues of many African nations, whether it be post-apartheid influences, a post-colonial economy that established dependency on the Global North and destroys local economies, an unstable democracy, an unorganized government, or corrupt local council. The relationship all these topics have with environmental change is the projected unpredictability regarding its impacts. Environmental change adds to the existing issues and complicates solutions more by now incorporating aspects like major weather variability, floods, droughts, unpredictable water borne disease patterns, food and water scarcity, safe water access; meaning the prevention of such events and c...

So far, we’ve tackled many ways in which environmental change will impact water and development in Africa, however we’ve neglected the stakeholders in charge of the management of these water resources. In this post I will be discussing the relationship between environmental change and water resource management and debate different approaches to water management. An  adaptation to climate change in Africa study  concluded that climate change is likely to be responsible for the displacement of agriculture and water resources thus affecting economic investments and stakeholders. The paper also outlines that the most critical need in Africa is organization to ensure the promotion of ‘sound adaptive strategies in the context of sustainable development objectives’ and that oftentimes community and civic groups lack the appropriate funding, technology, and personnel to achieve the same goals as centralized or private management. However, is this always the case? Different papers on t...