Water, Politics, Conflict in North West Africa

In this final post I wanted to take the opportunity to summarise and reflect on the path of my blog over the past weeks, noting down key findings which might provide insight regarding the future of water management in Africa.  Analysis of water scarcity measurements depict the nationally-limited perspective of existing methods, as well as highlighting the lack of a necessary holistic approach to water management. This is evidenced in post 2, where construction of the GERD illustrates the coming need for transnational cooperation of water management. Posts 6 and 8 further emphasise the transnational nature of water resources in Africa requiring better understanding of the geological nature of both renewable and non-renewable water sources.  Evaluating the structure of current water management has evidenced the need for a more nuanced approach than current governmental and private organisations are providing. Posts 2, 3, 4 illustrate the growing citizen participation movement and mov

In this penultimate blog I want to think more holistically about the future of water resource management, by building on the topic of renewable water supply in Egypt (as touched upon in Blogs 7 and 2) and by thinking about the role of scientific institutions in water management. In Blog 2 I attempted to critically evaluate the utility of the WSI and MARR as methods for estimating the extent of a nations water scarcity issues (using the case study of the GERD obscuring accurate estimations in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia). One crucial aspect of the water problem in Egypt yet to be addressed is determining the proportion of water drawn out which can be regarded as renewable, as well as estimates of Egypt’s dependance on non-renewable fossil groundwater. As outlined in Blog 7, Egypt is situated above the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS), a fossil groundwater aquifer system. The volume and mechanics of which are currently unknown, as well as likely impacts that water extraction will ha